I would suggest you consider growing them from seed instead. Speciosa can flower from seed in less time than it takes for a cutting to root and grow to flowering--less than a year. The smaller growing speciosas can be brought into flower in about six months. From one seed packet you can get a wide variety of plants in colors and patterns. After your original plants grow up, you can easily propagate them from leaves, cuttings or from your own seed, which is easy to produce and easy to germinate and grow into flower. The best source of seed is the seed fund of AGGS, which I described recently in another post on this forum. There are about 20 different speciosa selections in the seed fund, listed both under the species, Sinningia speciosa (for natural forms of the species) and under Florist Gloxinia for hybrid seed selections.

Its hard to compare the time it takes to flower a speciosa grown from a tuber to that grown from seed, but the time is not that much different. When grown from seed they will often bloom while the developing tuber is quite small. The tuber then grows up after the flowering, while the plant is still in foliage.

Welcome to the forum,

Jon

I don't understand what AGGS is...do you have a web site where I can purchase seeds...I've been looking all day..amazon does not have them.

DogLover -

it is no surprise - th post is 7 years old. Now the society is called The Gesneriad Society (gesneriadsociety.org). Members of the Society grow all kinds of plants belonging to the Gesneriad family, and the seeds are available for members. I do not think a lot of members actually grow Sinnigia Speciosa (florist gloxinia), but they carry some. The seeds you want to purchase are available on AMAZON and on ebay. If you want to purchase a young named plant and not bother with growing from seeds - that can be viable or old, who knows - Violetbarn.com carries several varieties. Lok under other gesneriads - Sinningias

Good Luck

irina

Here is a link that might be useful: seeds on Amazon