Looking for a head-turning houseplant? These flowers will ruffle some feathers

It’s impossible to overstate the vivacious colour raging through the domed growing house at Peter Harris’ and Jesse Exiner’s White House Nursery. There are enormous, ruffled, ebullient flowers in pinks and peaches, in acid reds and buttery yellows, in whites and lime greens. It’s jaw dropping.

“It’s like your grandmother’s 1950s chintz sofa,” Harris says of the collection of tuberous begonias he has been putting together for more than eight years. “It just blows my mind.”

And as if this cacophony of blooms needed extra pomp, Exiner has arranged before it a row of outrageously lacey wrought iron chairs so that you can sit down and soak up the begonia display the two are running from their mail-order nursery in Ashbourne, near Woodend, until early April.

This is the third year, the two have run the show that – this being tuberous begonia season – coincides with the Ballarat Begonia Festival. While the Ballarat event, which was established in 1953 and this year runs from March 11 to 13, features begonia cultivars acquired from breeders around the world including some that have been growing in the town for more than 120 years, the White House Nursery largely focuses on new crosses bred by Harris.

Every year Harris hand pollinates hundreds of tuberous begonias, by transferring the pollen from one flower to the stigma of another, gradually making them fuller and frillier as he goes. “Look at them, look at the total flamboyance of them. Is that over the top or what?”

Despite the begonias’ long history in Australia, these plants, which mostly originated in South and Central America, Africa and southern Asia, are currently having a moment. First the houseplant boom got us tending rhizomatous and cane-stemmed begonias with their stripy, spotty, spiralling or otherwise brazen foliage. And now attention is turning to the tuberous types, hybrids with what is often complex parentage and which have most of the flamboyance in the flower.

While the flowers of tuberous begonias can resemble everything from camellias and water lilies to gerberas, Harris says he “loves the big ruffled rose-like” ones best. “That’s what I am crossing for. I like thick stems and proud double flowers, not the head hangers.”