Bay Area Gardening: Mystery flower in an Irish onion patch

Q. Can you tell me about this plant that grew in my backyard?

My mother planted some bulbs for spring onions, and then these unidentified plants started growing. I pulled a few out, thinking it was some kind of weed, but a couple were left and the next thing we knew, they produced a beautiful flower, which always was closed by the time I got home in the evening.

Recently, I was home, and I got to witness it.

Danguole, Dublin, Ireland

A. The flowers your mum accidentally grew in the onion patch are tiger flowers (Tigridia pavonia). They are native to Mexico, but are cultivated throughout the world. They are part of the iris family, and they often are mistaken for gladiolas because of their sparse, sword-like foliage.

The tri-petal blooms are open for only a day, but the plant produces multiple flowers — and what glorious flowers they are.

I’m not sure how the tiger flower bulbs got mixed in with onion bulbs, but unless your mother or a very close neighbor has others growing close by, it’s likely these were mislabeled. The flower bulbs — if you’re keeping them — should be dug up and divided every three years. If you live in a zone with particularly cold winters, you might need to dig them up and store them indoors until spring.

Don’t prune the tiger flower until the foliage dies and turns brown in the autumn. Allowing the foliage to continue to grow after the flowers have faded will help replenish the bulb and improve the chances they will bloom again in spring.

Q. I live in an older apartment building, and there is a long driveway leading to the rear with double curbs about 18 inches apart, filled with small rocks. There are no plants or shrubbery, but there is one peach tree near the end.

The tree is never pruned or watered, but each year bears so much fruit that many of the branches literally snap. This year, however, something very strange happened.

The tree produced about a quarter of its usual yield, and the peaches are the size of grapefruit. The fruit is as sweet and tasty as ever, but just one is enough for two meals.

Oops, what happened here? What message is Mother Nature sending? My neighbors and I are confused.

Joe Hargrove, Santa Clara

A. A couple of things may be responsible. The peach tree may have found just the right weather conditions to produce delicious fruit, and someone or something looks to have thinned the fruit early in the season.

Gardeners struggle with the idea of removing — or thinning — what looks like perfectly good fruit in order to produce fewer, but tastier and larger ones. Thinning means the fruit has less competition for a tree’s resources, and fruit grows larger when it isn’t crowded on the tree. Too much fruit, as you’ve seen, can break and damage limbs, so thinning helps out there, too.

Whether a gardener took pity on the tree and thinned the crop, the wind knocked some off or animals helped themselves at a crucial time, I can’t say. But something worked this year.

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