In our ideal climate of the greenhouse, we often have plants bloom that don’t at home or in offices. When I noticed two separate Aloe species, A. ‘Blizzard’ and A. ‘Christmas Carol’ blooming at the same time in late 2021, I got a botanically perverted idea. I took a sterilized paintbrush and took pollen from my Christmas Carol flowers and transferred them on our collection’s Blizzard’s stigmas. I marked each pollination with tape and the date, and was careful not to use the brush on any other flowers that I didn’t want crossed. Of course I also probably took some pollen from A. ‘Blizzard’ over to A. ‘Christmas Carol’, but none of the flowers were pollinated.
Below is a video of how I self-pollinated the adult A. ‘Bokeh’ by transferring pollen in between flowers. The process is very easy! You can see pollen on the brush, and all I do is move it to another flower’s stigma. I twirl the brush around and try to cover a lot of the surface to get as much pollen off as possible, which often results in my paintbrush being covered in that flower’s pollen. When self pollinating this is totally fine, because I want only this plant’s pollen anyway. If you are wanting to cross different species and have only one type of pollen on the brush at a time, use a new/sterile brush in between each pollination.
Not all pollinations took, but I could tell a flower was pollinated when the base swelled up even after the petals had dried up and fallen off. Slowly a green seed pod forms, and when it’s dry and brown, I can harvest the three seeds from each pod.
Seeds can be planted directly into a germination mix (I use a no bark, small particle mix with itty bitty peat and perlite), and gently covered. I use a mist bench to germinate almost all seeds, but you can also use some sort of humidity dome! Just be sure to give it some air flow. I have no experience with using old Aloe seed, so I recommend planting it soon after harvesting. I personally do nothing to scarify the seeds.
The seedling planted grew quickly into a tall rosette shape, something neither of the parents have. The mother plant, A. ‘Blizzard’, is light green with dark green flecks along the leaves, and minimal ridging. The father plant, A. ‘Chrsitmas Carol’, is more of a blue-green (more green on the center and on new growth) with light colored flecks. It also has red-pink color and more pronounced, yet short and soft, ridges along the leaf edges and a few along the middle of the leaf.
The new hybrid has a similar blue-green color to its mother Blizzard, but only very faint pink edges, if at all. Greenhouse horticulturist Michael Stephan helped me name it and called it ‘Bokeh’ after the photography technique of blurred background lights.
The plant displays unique characteristics for Aloes. For example, often when Aloes bloom they typically only have a single stalk (sometimes it branches), but Aloe ‘Bokeh’ often branches multiple times on a single stalk. I’ve also never seen any Aloes self pollinate or cross with each other, but every time Aloe ‘Bokeh’ blooms, it grows at least one seed pod.
Aloe is a genus of succulents from the eastern hemisphere, mainly sub-Saharan Africa and southwestern Asia. The most common species of course being Aloe vera, grown for its medicinal use. According to the Royal Kew Gardens, there are almost 600 accepted species of Aloe. This list doesn’t seem to include artificial hybrids, including the two parent species of A. ‘Bokeh’, so the list of species is likely much, much longer! It can be often confused with species in Agave, basically the western hemisphere equivalent. Unlike monocarpic Agave though, Aloes are polycarpic and can bloom multiple times before they die. This means Aloe bloom stalks typically come from the side of the plant, while Agaves bloom from the center.
For more information on Aloes, check out these resources available through the WashU Libraries:
Haworth, Adrian Hardy. A New Arrangement of the Genus Aloe: With a Chronological Sketch of the Progressive Knowledge of That Genus, and of the Other Succulent Genera. R. Taylor, 1804.
Reynolds, Tom. Aloes: The Genus Aloe. CRC Press, 2004.