| ________Iochroma cyaneum ‘Indigo’, ‘Royal Blue’, ‘Sky King’, and I. ‘Wine Red’ were obtained by the third author before 1993 as unnamed collections of I. cyaneum, and have been grown and offered by his mail-order nursery for several years. All are believed to have originated in Ecuador and were received from various collectors over the years. The first author obtained rooted cuttings of each cultivar from Kartuz Greenhouses in 1999 and began three years of evaluation. All four have shown a surprising amount of heat tolerance in Miami, FL given the altitudinal distribution of this species in the Andes. They are propagated readily, very fast-growing, and virtually ever-blooming. We believe that, given their ease of propagation, rapid production rate, and ever-blooming phenology, all four have potential to be mass-marketed for seasonal color in USDA Hardiness Zones beyond their expected low temperature tolerance.
________Iochroma cyaneum is a soft-stemmed, brittle-wooded, well-branched shrub reaching that reaches about 5’ in height. Inflorescences are axillary umbels on new wood, 5 to 20 flowered. The flowers are tubular, several inches long, and very showy. The fruit is a globose berry, enclosed by the calyx, with numerous small seeds surrounded by pulp. Seed set has not been observed to date in Florida.
________When first open, the flowers of I. cyaneum ‘Indigo’ (Fig. 1) are Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) purple 79A; they lighten with age to 78A to B. I. cyaneum ‘Royal Blue’ (Fig. 2) has RHS violet-blue 93A flowers that lighten 90C. ‘Royal Blue’ has a longer calyx than does any of the other cultivars. I. cyaneum ‘Sky King’ (Fig. 3) flowers open RHS violet 88C, fading to 88D.
________Iochroma ‘Wine Red’ (Fig. 4) has not yet been able to be indentified to species, and DNA amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) profiles (Meerow et al., 2004) suggest that it is a species other than I. cyaneum. ‘Wine Red’ has hairier young stems than the previous three cultivars, and slightly larger leaves. When the flowers first open they are RHS red-purple 61B, fading to 64D. To date, there is no published treatment of Iochroma that would allow easy identification of an unknown species.
________The first author has seen I. cyaneum in habitat in Ecuador on multiple occasions, and the first three cultivars described in this paper are readily assignable to that species. I. cyaneum does vary in flower color, and other cultivars have been described in the species, e.g., ‘Alba’, ‘Apricot Belle’, ‘Woodcote White’ (Ellison, 1995, the latter mislabeled as a cv. of I. grandiflora). The I. grandiflora pictured by Ellison (1995) appears similar to ‘Wine Red’, but is definitely not I. grandiflora, a high-elevation scrambling shrub with very large blue flowers (Shaw, 1998; pers. obs.).
________All four Iochroma cyaneum cultivars are readily propagated in spring and autumn, and probably at any other time of year. Both softwood and semi-ripened wood cuttings from actively growing plants root within 4 to 6 weeks under intermittent mist, treated with a 5 s basal end dip in 1000-2500 PPM indolebutyric acid, though percentages were slightly lower with the lower concentration.
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