A brief history...

The English naturalist William J. Burchell is recorded as having been the first person to make a scientific collection of a Clivia (Clivia nobilis) in the wild, which he did near the mouth of the Great Fish River in the Eastern Cape in September 1815.

  During the early 1820s, the intrepid Kew gardener and botanical collector, James Bowie, gathered plants of this species, a pendulous-flowered clivia, in the same area of the Eastern Cape and sent them to England. In October 1828, Kew botanist and horticulturist John Lindley described Clivia nobilis and named it after Lady Charlotte Florentine Clive, Duchess of Northumberland. Lady Clive had been cultivating many of Bowie's plants in her conservatory at Syon House, just over the Thames from Kew.

One of South Africa's showiest bulbous plants, the trumpet-flowered Clivia miniata,  was discovered in KwaZulu-Natal in the early 1850s, and has been in cultivation in England for a century and a half. During the Victorian era it became a very popular indoor plant.

In 1856, Major Robert Garden collected a different pendulous-flowered Clivia species in KwaZulu-Natal, which was sent to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and later described as Clivia gardenii.

The discovery of the first yellow form of Clivia miniata in about 1888 in Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, provided gardeners and breeders in England with yet another sought-after floral prize from South Africa. The first published report of the yellow clivia was made by Mr W. Watson in volume 25 of The Gardener's Chronicle in 1899, which he followed with a formal description of C. miniata var. citrina in volume 56 of The Garden, published the same year.

Clivia caulescens, another pendulous-flowered Clivia which develops a curious aerial stem with age, occurs in the eastern parts of Mpumalanga and in the Northern Province. It was described by Dr R.A. Dyer in 1943.

In 2002 a fifth species, Clivia mirabilis, was discovered.

A sixth species, Clivia robusta, was officially described in 2004. 

Source: Graham Duncan, Grow Clivias, published by the South African Biodiversity Institute, Kirstenbosch

Portrait of Lady Clive, Powys Castle & Garden, Wales