If you’ve recently admired wonderful overhanging clusters of flowers on the terrace of friends and then want to buy a Sundaville, you will occasionally hear that this is not a good idea because this plant is so difficult to hibernate. Not at all true, at least not if you deal a little beforehand with the origins and breeding of this beautiful plant and its wintering needs. You can find out a lot about it here.
Table of Contents
Sundaville are actually called quite differently.
The Sundaville got its beautiful name from an imaginative Japanese breeder who really achieved an extraordinary breeding success with this special hybrid. The basis of this breeding success lay the “Sundaville Red”, which develops flowers in such an intense red as has never been seen in these plants. As a result, other Sundavilles were bred by this Japanese breeder, for example varieties in white and pink and a very interesting dark red. A general characteristic of the Sundaville is particularly rapid growth in summer and the formation of a storage root, thanks to which it can survive dry phases.
That is why the name Sundaville does not come from “Sun” or “Sonne”, as is usually assumed, but the proud breeder put this name together from his Japanese company name Suntory Flowers Limited and Mandevilla, the scientific name of the genus. The really flowery name is not there to make the plant appear “sunnier”, but to turn a plant into a protected “brand” in order to be able to sue anyone who wants to sell a similar-looking cultivation.
The Mandevillas are also known under the synonym Dipladenia, and they are a genus comprising a good 100 species and native to tropical America. Mandevillas grow as lianas, subshrubs or climbing plants, and several species of them are cultivated in Europe as house or garden plants. The Sundaville is grown from the Mandevilla sanderi, a popular cultivar with pink flowers. It is not the only hybrid of this type, but most hybrids are limited to the most varied shades of pink, the strong red is something very special.
Thanks to these and other sensational breeds, the Mandevilla has recently come back into fashion, after having distanced itself for more than 100 years from the creepers that were popular in the early days of the company.
Find out everything you need to know about taking care of the Dipladenia.
Winter in Sundaville
The Mandevilla is a tropical plant, of which special cultivated forms first had to be developed for keeping in temperate zones. These cultivated forms such as the Sundaville no longer grow at full power all year round like the tropical plants, but they are drawn to take a break after the completion of a growth phase, during which the metabolism of the plant is shut down. Only in this way can the Sundaville develop the strength in the European climate to develop its abundance of flowers every season.
The summer season should spend a Sundaville outdoors, the hybrids also have a considerable need for light and could otherwise have difficulties with the flower development. The plant can stay there until the first frost threatens. The Sundaville must be brought to its winter quarters in good time before the first frost, i.e. before the first frost, a few hours in frosty temperatures could cause considerable damage to the plant.
Now the Sundaville is also being pruned, and vigorously, because it only flowers on young shoots anyway, which can then develop all the more abundantly in the next season. If the space suitable for wintering does not offer a lot of space, you can “cut off” the Sundaville quite radically to the ground. It can easily be cut back deep into the old wood.
You can prepare the Sundaville for hibernation and the pruning shortly beforehand by either letting it cling to a frame that can be moved to winter quarters or by pruning it regularly and continuously and thus growing a bushy plant. By the way, with every cutting measure you should make sure that you do not accidentally bring the escaping white milk juice into contact with your eyes or mucous membranes – it contains toxic substances that can quickly lead to unpleasant irritation.
The Sundaville now pauses during the winter. To do this, it is placed in a bright room with temperatures between 5 and 15 degrees, e.g. B. a winter garden. It needs daylight, but no glaring sunlight in winter, and the plant should also be protected from drafts.
Alternatives to wintering in the winter garden
If you don’t have a conservatory or a room of similar brightness and temperatures, you could try wintering the Sundaville indoors. In this case you would have to look for the coolest room and the brightest location in this room, and you would have to reckon with the fact that the plant would rather “muckle” over the winter. It will probably also develop some desperate Geiltriebe, which then have to be cut away in the spring. If you are lucky, however, the extremely vigorous Sundaville will recover quickly outdoors in summer and will soon show young shoots that are still blooming in the same season. If not, wintering too warm will lead to blooming laziness in the next season, and you may have to do without flowers altogether.
What you should rather not try is to overwinter the Sundaville in a dark cellar, darkness is completely unknown to this plant and will almost certainly cause it to die. If there is no other way, you could still try to irradiate the Sundaville with artificial daylight lamps in the winter quarters. Whether this is a conceivable alternative in times when the citizens are pretty much the only ones paying for the energy transition remains to be seen.
Cuttings instead of overwintering
With this unusually willing plant, which tolerates pruning so well, you can also proceed quite differently: You use all the sections that you remove before wintering to grow new Sundavilles, each 10 cm long shoot becomes a cutting, if you divide it so that there is a leaf knot at the bottom just above the end.
This lower end comes off with a little rooting powder in potting soil, cling film over it, in as warm a place as possible. A special indoor greenhouse is best suited for cultivation. In order for the cuttings to take root quickly, they need an environment (24 to 27 degrees), keep the soil slightly moist and … wait. After 3 to 4 weeks, the cuttings should be well rooted and can be moved into larger pots with climbing support, and in the next season they will replace the old plant if in doubt.
With this original Sundaville you can now start hibernating experiments without worries, you have a replacement in an emergency. Incidentally, people who have followed the same procedure often report that the old plant has survived too – perhaps in 100 years’ time one will discover that plants very well feel when “their person” is afraid for them and cannot cope with too much stress.
The care of the Dipladenia during the wintering
Caring for the Sundaville during the winter is actually not particularly complicated, but there are a few things to consider: The plant is kept (much) drier than in summer, but you have to be careful that the root ball never dries out completely during the winter dormancy. It doesn’t need a lot of water anyway, but if you water too much in winter, it can quickly lead to root rot. Most often the successful wintering fails because of too much watering …
The fertilizer application is completely stopped, and the temperature may have to be adjusted a little. If the Sundaville is getting yellow leaves, it is usually a little too cold. You should then carefully raise the temperatures a little at the lower end of the range mentioned above.
The Sundaville needs a fairly high level of humidity, and you should ventilate your winter quarters regularly to prevent fungal attack. You should also regularly check the Sundaville for pests, aphids and mites have a fairly easy job with strangers.
If the Sundaville loses almost all of its leaves during winter, this is less of a cause for concern, as it usually sprouts again in spring without hesitation. It can also happen that shoots dry out, no problem either, simply cut them off later at the start of shoots.
Prepare for the outdoor season
The Mandevilla can cope with wintering here, but it doesn’t exactly “cheer” and is therefore quite sensitive in the spring and should be treated with caution.
This includes For example, to prepare it carefully for the season, when the light is slowly increasing in January / February, it is put in a slightly warmer place by the (south) window, if it is nice and sunny in March, maybe a couple of times Hours on the terrace. In this way, they do not expose the plant to a thermal shock, but with the gradually warmer and lighter surroundings they already stimulate growth, the best preparation for abundant flowering in summer.
With the rise in temperature and brightness, you then slowly increase the watering until the Sundaville moves to the terrace after the ice saints (mid-May) and can “really get started”. If you observe that this is exactly what is happening, the plant will also be given the first dose of fertilizer. Here, too, the same applies as during the entire summer season: Never water the Sundaville too diligently, now in spring it would develop a large number of leaves, but almost no flowers.
Conclusion
It is not necessarily straightforward to hibernate a Sundaville, but once you have found the right environment and the right distance between waterings, it is no longer rocket science. And a little effort at the beginning is definitely worth it – the Sundaville is really easy to care for in summer, only needs to be watered once a week and still blooms continuously until the next frost. It does this in partial shade, but also on a sunny balcony, for which you will not find a comparably easy-care and water-supplying plant anytime soon.
