Bird of paradise

The bird of paradise is a South African plant, from the Eastern Cape where it grows in coastal scrub and along riverbanks, and it is the floral emblem of the city of Cape Town. The flower is one of the strangest things in cultivation: a horizontal boat shaped bract from which orange sepals and a blue arrow of fused petals emerge one at a time, built to be perched on and pollinated by sunbirds, which stand on the blue part and get dusted with pollen. Knowing where it comes from tells you how to grow it. It wants sun, it wants to be crowded, and it wants a dry winter.

Light

Full sun. Outdoors in a warm climate that means an open position; indoors it means the brightest window in the house, with four to six hours of direct sun as a minimum. This is not a preference, it is the condition on which flowering depends, and a bird of paradise in a bright but sunless room will make handsome leaves for a decade and never bloom.

Water

Water thoroughly through spring and summer when the top 4 cm of compost is dry, roughly weekly in a warm room, and cut back sharply in winter to about every eighteen days. It is drought tolerant once established, and the fastest way to lose one is a pot kept damp through a cool winter.

Outdoors in a frost free climate it needs very little once its roots are down. It survives a light frost with damage and will regrow from the base after a hard one if the ground does not freeze.

Feeding and repotting

It is hungry while it is growing. Feed at half strength every second watering through spring and summer, and stop entirely in winter. A plant that is being asked to produce flower stems needs the support.

Repotting is where most people go wrong. Leave it potbound. It flowers when the roots are crowded, and moving a plant into a generous pot resets it: several years of root and leaf growth follow before it blooms again. Repot every third year at most, one size up, and top dress in between by scraping off the top few centimetres and replacing them.

Getting it to flower

Three things decide it. Light, as above. Age, because a division takes two or three years to reach flowering size and a seedling four to six, so a small plant that has never flowered is very often simply too young. And crowding, because a happy potbound clump flowers where a comfortable one does not.

A mature plant in the right conditions flowers from late winter into spring in its native range, which is roughly August to November in the southern hemisphere and, for a plant grown under glass in the north, late winter to early summer. Each stem opens several flowers in succession over a few weeks.

Pruning and propagation

Cut spent flower stems and dead leaves out at the base. Nothing else needs pruning.

Divide a mature clump in spring, using a knife or a spade, and keep at least three or four leaves and a solid share of roots on each division. Expect it to sulk for a season. Seed is possible from fresh seed at about 25 degrees and is a long project, but it is the only way to raise a lot of plants at once.

Ailments

The complaint is almost always the same one, which is that it will not flower, and the answer is sun, age and a tight pot. Brown edges indoors are dry air or feed salts. Yellow lower leaves in winter mean too much water. Mealybugs hide where the leaf stalks meet the base and are worth looking for. The ledger below has the rest.