My Curcumas are light pink in color and have blueish small flowers that bloom from the cone area. The leaves come first and then the flowers. I would love to know what kind they may be if someone knows. I wish I could post a photo too. I love them and was very surprised to see them return the year after we planted them. We live in S. Florida and don’t have to take them out of the ground. I don’t know much about bulbs…but if we move to NC, I would like to take them with me and hope they will grow there too. Sue K.

I wrote back to Sue and offered to post her photos to see whether anyone else who reads this blog might identify them.

Her Curcuma is beautiful!

Click on any of these thumbnails to see a larger version. The first photo includes a bonus dragonfly. Sue noted that the flower in the vase was cut because they had a storm and the stem was bent. The little blue flower opened after she brought the flower inside.

I’m intrigued that the leaves of her Curcuma come up first, then the flowers. The flower stems do seem to come up directly from the ground, though, like our Curcuma here in Panama.

With a little searching on the internet, I think we’ve come up with the name of this Curcuma, but I’d like to ask your opinion. What do you think Sue’s Curcuma is? (If no one knows, I’ll post our guess next week.)

Update: We have one answer so far, posted as a comment to the original post on Curcuma. You can follow the link over there if you want to see it, or you can make your own guess without peeking by leaving a comment below!

Update 2 – The Answer: Sue’s Curcuma is probably Curcuma alismatifolia, as Carla guessed in the one and only attempt that anyone made to answer. It’s a probable, not a definitive ID, because of the number of cultivars and unnamed hybrids in this genus. The story is told well, with another lovely photo, at Botany Photo of a Day, where even the expert called his identification tentative.

The common name of this flower, if C. alismatifolia is indeed what it is, is Siam Tulip. Carla mentioned in an email message to me that a friend had sent her a photo of a whole field of these flowers in bloom, just like a field of tulips. One of the comments at the Botany Photo of a Day site mentioned that this open area habitat is unlike that preferred by many other gingers. I couldn’t say about that, but the mind boggles at the thought of a field of Siam Tulips!

A well-traveled acquaintance said in those early days that she’d never seen this plant anywhere except in Panama. I thought at the time that maybe it was a native plant, but I’ve learned that’s not so, and that it does occur in places other than Panama. But it wasn’t until our friend Carla (of Heliconia fame) was visiting recently and made a reference to the scientific name of the plant that I thought I’d better look into it a little further.

It shoots up like this at the end of the dry season, and later the leaves come up out of the ground – they’re not attached to the original stalks. Our Panamanian friends call it the “Resurrection Plant.” I’m not sure, but maybe that’s because it often comes up around Easter time.
It is a member of the Ginger family – the Zingiberaceae – and is in the same genus, Curcuma, as the plant that produces turmeric. Dave’s Botanary tells me that the genus name Curcuma comes from the Arabic kurkum, meaning saffron. Now saffron comes from a crocus, which is not even a member of the ginger family, so this is a bit of a blind alley, and I don’t know what to make of it.

Wikipedia has this to say about the genus:

Curcuma is a genus of about 80 accepted species in the plant family Zingiberaceae that contains such species as turmeric and Siam Tulip. Since assembly of the genus Curcuma by Linnaeus in 1753 about 130 species have been described so far. Some of the species descriptions are without Latin diagnosis or type specimen, therefore the legitimate status of many species is suspicious and remains unclear.

I tried for awhile to track down the species name for our Panamanian Curcuma, even though the above paragraph was a little discouraging. A cultivar is given the botanical name Curcuma ‘Panama Purple’ at Gingers R Us, but it seems to be a collected Curcuma zedoaria, as far as I can piece together from some information from a friend of Carla’s and from the Gingers R Us web site.

In fact, so little is known about the distribution of Curcuma zedoaria that the map from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility shows only one location in Florida and another in Indonesia (squint tight and look for tiny yellow dots).

The species name zedoaria is a Latinized form of ancient Perisan name for this herb – zedoary – which is a bitter spice plant sometimes used in Thai cooking. Curcuma zedoaria is also known as “white turmeric” in India where it is considered a weed. However its rhizome has a smell similar to turmeric and mango and has many medicinal uses in India.

The yellow flower appears within the purple or green bracts of the shoot. I’ve read that Curcumas are insect-pollinated, but nearly every day when I look out the kitchen window I see a hummingbird exploring the flowers (I never have my camera, of course!). The plant certainly has the right colors for hummingbird pollination, but I’ve found no reference to such anywhere on the web.

As an ornamental, Curcumas are grown for their foliage. I mentioned earlier that the leaves emerge after the flowers do. Here comes the first leaf in the stand I see out the kitchen window:

It has a nice purple midrib, which is one of its appeals as a foliage plant. Later on, the leaves take over the stand:

You can just see the flowers peaking out from beneath the leaves. Sometimes you can’t see them at all, hence the common name for Curcumas – “hidden ginger.”

Although Curcumas are grown for their foliage, the foliage does die back every year. By the time the foliage dies back the flowers are long since gone. Perhaps this year I will take it upon myself to track the flowers and see just exactly how long they do last under that forest of leaves.