Calla Lilies As Cut Flowers and Pot Plants

Callalilies ( Zantedeschia spp.) are grown and marketed as cut flowers and pot plants, because of their attractive spathe. It is believed that calla lily has the potential to be an important bulb crop in Taiwan. The Taiwan Seed Improvement and Propagation Station (TSIPS) began to develop a production system for healthy tubers in 1996. The major activities of this program included micropropagation and tuber production.

Virus Diseases of Calla Lily

The most common viruses that infect the calla lily are cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) and dasheen mosaic virus (DsMV). Viruses can be eliminated from calla lilies by shoot-tip micropropagation. Heat treatment combined with shoot-tip culture is an effective way of eliminating virus from many crops.

Tissue Culture

In the case of calla lily, however, it is not necessary to eliminate virus by heat pretreatment. Plantlets free of CMV and DsMV can be obtained by culturing apical buds 2 - 4 mm long in MS medium, supplemented with myoinositol, thiamine and BA. In addition to being free of virus, tissue culture-derived seedlings are alternative materials for the production of flowering-size tubers.

Tuber Size

However, balancing the rate of multiplication and the size of plantlets in a tissue culture system is important in establishing an efficient system of tuber production. It was found that tuber size was influenced by the size of the plantlet and its cultural condition (i.e. planting density and fertilization program). Our results showed that larger seedlings tended to produce larger and heavier tubers. The largest tuber size was obtained at a plant density of 176 plants/m2. The medium should be supplemented with applications of liquid fertilizer

(20 - 20 - 20 N-P-K) every two weeks. These results showed that it is possible to increase the tuber size if a proper cultural technique and high-quality seedlings grown by tissue culture are used.

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