They can be
evergreen or
deciduous perennials that grow from basal underground
corms. The alternate leaves are
cauline (stem-borne) and
ensiform (sword-shaped). The blades are parallel-veined. The margin is entire. The corms form in vertical chains, with the youngest at the top, and oldest and largest buried most deeply in the soil. The roots of the lowermost corm in a chain are contractile roots and drag the corm deeper into the ground where conditions allow. The chains of corms are fragile and easily separated, a quality that has enabled some species to become invasive and difficult to control in the garden. They have colourful
inflorescences of 4 to 20 vivid red and orange alternate flowers on a horizontally
divaricate (branched) stem. The terminal inflorescence can have the form of a
cyme or a
raceme. These flower from early summer well into autumn. The flowers are
sessile on a
flexuose (zigzag) arched
spike. The fertile flowers are
hermaphroditic. All
stamens have an equal length. The
style branches are
apically forked. They are
pollinated by insects, birds (
sunbirds) or by the wind. The
dehiscent capsules are shorter than they are wide. The genus name is derived from the Greek words
krokos, meaning "saffron", and
osme, meaning "odour" – from the dried leaves emitting a strong smell like that of
saffron (a spice derived from
Crocus – another genus belonging to the Iridaceae) when immersed in hot water. The alternative name
montbretia is still widely used, especially for the garden hybrid
C. × crocosmiiflora. "Montbretia" is commonly used in the British Isles for orange-flowered
C. ×
crocosmiiflora cultivars that have naturalised, while "crocosmia" is reserved for less aggressive red-flowered cultivars.
Montbretia is also a
heterotypic synonym of the genus
Tritonia, in which some species of
Crocosmia were once included. It was named by
Alire Raffeneau Delile for , a fellow French botanist on Napoleon's
Egyptian Campaign. == Species ==