Bring Color Indoors: How to Cultivate Gorgeous Gloxinia Plants in Your Home

The plants commonly known as gloxinias are mostly varieties of one species, Sinningia speciosa , which is native to Brazil. The name Gloxinia was given in honor of Benjamin Peter Gloxin, a French botanical writer who lived in the late 18th century. The name of the genus honors Wilhelm Sinning, a gardener at the University of Bonn in the mid-19th century. He carried out intensive hybridization and selection work with this plant that we can now enjoy in gardens and interiors.

These modern hybrids have brightly coloured, bell-shaped flowers and velvety, deep green leaves. The flowers range in colour from rich crimson, deep red, violet and white to various combinations of these colours. Gloxinia tigrinae have flowers with a large number of spots or delicately veined in these colours on a white background.

Gloxinias can be grown from seed, cuttings or tubers in late winter/early spring, but they are demanding plants as they need attention to grow and thrive. The tubers survive from year to year but should not be kept for more than 2 or 3 years as the plant tends to lose its vigor. Basic care for gloxinia consists of placing it in a bright place but without direct sunlight and where there are no draughts , watering it weekly adding liquid fertilizer during the period of flower budding. When the ambient temperature exceeds 24ºC they need sufficient humidity, spray the leaves with a nebulizer or place the pots on a tray with pebbles and water or moistened peat. In summer we will water them two or three times a week. The plant will not develop unless the ambient temperature is above 21ºC .

In any case, you have to be careful with the water, the soil in the pot must be well drained and we will never water by immersion. When the season ends and the plant dies, we can leave the tubers so that they sprout the following season or we can also take advantage of the opportunity to reproduce the gloxinia. We will take the tuber and cut it into pieces, each piece can be planted in a pot and a new plant will emerge from it.

It is a beautiful plant that will give us great satisfaction and with a little care it will look splendid all year round. An excellent and beautiful indoor plant that we can use to decorate our home.