Hand pollination for beginners

Luka Gouws and Daniel Pretorius · 3 min read · 22 September 2026

When growing Clivia, the best way to breed the plant is through hand pollination. Your hands essentially replace the insects that would have pollinated the plants. It is also where a plant's provenance begins, because it allows you to record who the plant's parents are.

Understanding a Clivia flower's anatomy

A Clivia flower head, the umbel, sits on a leafless stalk, known as a scape. Each flower is held on its own short stalk: the pedicel. There are three inner and three outer petals (or tepals) that surround the reproductive parts.

The male parts of a Clivia flower are called stamens: six of these thread-like filaments are tipped with a pollen-bearing anther. The female part, known as a pistil, runs down the centre, where a three-armed stigma at the top catches pollen. The stigma is supported by the style (a stalk), which runs to the base where the ovary is located.

The ovary has three chambers holding roughly eight to ten ovules each. Once an ovule is fertilised, it can become a seed.

Before you start: the process of emasculation

Clivia can self-pollinate and produce copies of itself. To prevent this from happening, breeders often emasculate the plant by removing the plant's anthers (where the pollen is located). This involves lifting out the six anthers from a flower before they open and shed, which is about a day before the flower is fully receptive. By removing the anthers, the plant cannot self-pollinate and you can be sure that the plant's parentage is true.

Hand pollination and the art of patience

Transferring the pollen from the father plant to the mother plant is the easy part. Simply touch the ripe pollen on the father plant and gently transfer enough of it onto the three sticky tips of the mother's stigma. The pollen should fully coat the stigma. This process can be repeated the next day to be sure. At this point, you should label the flower with a small tag to record its parentage. Hang the tag around the pedicel.

What might get more tricky is establishing when, exactly, this process should take place. Here is a list to help you judge if time is right:

Pollen is ripe when the anther looks dry and fluffy, and the pollen easily dusts off onto a fingertip.
The stigma is ready soon after the flower opens: its three arms separate and the tips turn glossy and sticky.

When the flower is ready, hand-pollinate the plants mid-morning on a dry day, but remember that the flowers are only receptive for three days. Some flowers are more stubborn than others, so if the stigma is dry and unwilling, simply trim the tip to expose the receptive tissue into the style.

Now onto the art of patience: Clivia often take years to flower, but it's always worth the wait. A pollinated ovary swells into a berry, and the berry can take eight to fifteen months to ripen. These berries can hold up to fifteen seeds, depending on how many ovules were fertilised. The seeds are naked and recalcitrant, which means that they have no hard coat and cannot be dried and stored like ordinary seeds. The best way to plant them is to clean off all the fresh membrane and plant them as soon as possible, because the seedling might have already started to germinate inside the berry. Once the seed is in the ground, seedlings can take anywhere from three to five years, and flowering even longer.

Becoming a professional breeder

Everyone, with the right amount of patience, can dabble in Clivia crosses. But, if you really want to take it to the next level, here is what you need to do.

Clivia have a wide range of species and these don't necessarily flower at the same time. The miniata flower in spring, while the gardenii and robusta flower during autumn and winter. Breeding these species with each other might seem very difficult, but you can store the pollen. The most reliable way to store pollen is to collect anthers when they are dry and ripe. Once the anthers are harvested, place them in small labelled containers in the refrigerator (where the pollen stays viable for weeks) or freezer (where their viability extends for much longer). By doing this, pollen from an autumn plant can be used on a winter plant, or a rare father's pollen can be saved for a plant yet to bloom.

Recording the parentage is key. My personal favourite is the A X B method:

A (the plant that carried the seed) X B (the plant that supplied the pollen)

If a plant self-pollinated, simply record it as A (the plant that carried the seed) X SELF. By using this method, I am able to track my plants' parentage across generations.

Happy Clivia crossing!