Tulipa saxatilis
Tulipa saxatilis 'Lilac Wonder'
The Rock tulip ( Tulipa saxatilis ) sometimes Cretan tulip [Footnote 1 ] or Kandia - called tulip, is a species of the genus of tulips ( Tulipa) in the lily family ( Liliaceae ).
Features
The Rock tulip is a perennial herbaceous plant. The stems reach stature heights of up to 25 centimeters. This Geophyt forms onions as outlasting. The egg-shaped bulbs have a tough shell, are 2 to 3.5 inches long and 1.5 to 3 inches thick. The two to three leaves are up to 38 centimeters long and 4.5 centimeters wide, flat, narrowly lanceolate and glossy on the upper side clearly.
The flowers are mostly single, rarely, in pairs on the stem. The bloom are light pink, have a sharply defined yellow spot at the base and are pointed. The three outer bracts are 38 to 53 mm long and 9-18 mm wide, the three inner are of equal length but wider. The stamens are hairy at the base. The dust bags are brown to blackish and have a length from 4.5 to 7 millimeters. The capsule has obvious at the top of the cross veins.
The flowering period extends from March to May There are diploid and triploid plants with 2n = 24 and 36 chromosomes.
Occurrence
The Rock tulip is a plant of the South Aegean island arc. It occurs scattered in the limestone areas of Crete ( including the islands of Gavdos and slide) before, also on Karpathos ( on the mountain Kali Limni ) and isolated on Rhodes and the Turkish southwest Datça Peninsula. The species is naturalized in the UK on the Isles of Scilly. It settles field boundaries, scree slopes and rock faces at altitudes up to 900 m.