2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
Khirita (lat. Cirita) - decorative leafy flowering culture from the Gesneriev family.
Description
Khirita is a herbaceous perennial that looks like a shrub, or a herbaceous annual with rather soft stems. And sometimes you can see very miniature plants equipped with one or at most two leaves! As for the overwhelming majority of hirita types, they can boast of the presence of luxurious green leaves with very bizarre silvery designs. And all these leaves are collected in incredibly cute rosettes! And the flowers of hirita are also very beautiful and spectacular - these wonderful bell-shaped flowers can be pink, purple, white or even yellow! Outwardly, they somewhat resemble gloxinia flowers, but their size is much smaller. Each flower has five petals, and all flowers are collected in fairly loose inflorescences, each of which includes from three to seven flowers.
In total, this genus includes about one hundred fifty - one hundred and eighty species.
Where grows
Hirita is a plant native to China. Currently, this beauty can be found in a very vast territory: starting from India with Sri Lanka and right through the Himalayas up to the Malay Peninsula, Southeast Asia and China. Some varieties of hirita are also found on the islands of Borneo, Java and Sumatra. But in the Philippines, in Japan, Australia and Africa, hiritu cannot be seen.
Usage
Hirita is an excellent ornamental crop that is grown with great pleasure for its gorgeous leaves and luxurious flowers. And the ease of cultivation of this plant makes it even more attractive - wonderful hirita is able to forgive even small errors in care!
Growing and caring
The beauty hirita is very unpretentious - the conditions of her detention are in many ways similar to the conditions of keeping well-known violets. It is best to grow this plant on the western or eastern windows, in addition, in the summer it can be placed on the northern windows, and in the winter - on the southern ones. At the same time, the illumination level should ideally be medium, that is, not too high, but not low either, since with a prolonged shortage of light, the hirita will grow very slowly, its leaves will be crushed, the cuttings will stretch out, and the flowering will become extremely scarce or even be absent.
Hiritu should be watered sparingly - it tolerates waterlogging and overdrying equally unimportantly. For watering, ideally, you should use only soft and warm water, in every possible way trying to avoid getting it on the leaves with flowers and on the bases of the leaf rosettes. And hirita is generally undemanding to air humidity.
Flowers that have already faded, as well as old yellowed leaves, must be removed in a timely manner. Top dressing will not be superfluous: starting from spring and right up to autumn, it is recommended to feed hiritu every two weeks with balanced liquid fertilizers, however, their dosage should be at least halved, since this plant does not need too much nutrients.
This unpretentious beauty boasts a very impressive resistance to significant, but at the same time short-term temperature changes - it can easily withstand temperature fluctuations from six to twenty-eight degrees! Nevertheless, the most optimal temperature regime for hirita is considered to be the range from fifteen to twenty degrees in winter and from twenty-two to twenty-five degrees in summer. As for drafts, this green pet is very sensitive to them, even though it is extremely partial to the access of fresh air. And this plant reproduces both by stepchildren and by apical or leaf cuttings.
If you strictly follow all the conditions for keeping this beautiful flower, the likelihood that it can get sick will be reduced to almost zero!
