[Andrew]

RE the so called dry rest for kingies, there is an element of truth in it but it's very much overstated and applies more to the inferior quality keiki machines rather than to the line bred and selected plants. Kingies vary greatly in their willingness to flower vs their willingness to produce keiki's. Much of this is genetically influenced but environment can direct bad genetics to some extent. The kingies sold by most Australian nurseries are the result of breeding programs that have tried to produce better flowering plants with a lower tendency to produce keiki's. Unfortunately the abundance of keiki's produced by some of the more inferior quality plants has meant that these poor plants often persist in cultivation via show sales tables (they're cheap) but they are slowly being culled from our collections. I have noticed that these poor quality plants are still prevelent in nurseries outside of Australia (although I have also noticed that there is an increasing amount of good quality breeding being sold in the States etc). With the more floriferous kingies in Australia you can water them regularly year round and they flower easily. If you're growing poor quality plants, reducing the water in the winter can reduce the tendancy to produce keiki's thus tipping the balance in favour of flowers but if the temperature is low enough and the light high enough, they'll often put up flowers anyway with minimal restriction of watering.

The problem comes when you try to grow this garbage too warm and not bright enough during winter in which case you will get plenty of keiki's and no flowers. If your conditions just fall short of good kingie conditions, holding back on the watering can reduce the keiki growth enough to get some flowering. The problem with this is that plants have higher water needs at higher temps so you have to balance forcing the plant out of active growth with the risk of desiccation.

Realistically though, if you don't have a suitable environment for growing kingianums you'd be better ditching the high keiki/low flower garbage and buying some decent quality plants to give you a fighting chance of getting them to flower without having to hold back on water. Not knowing the American nurseries, all I can recommend is that if the kingies you see for sale have clonal names in the breeding background, your chances of buying something decent are reasonable. If the nursery classifies the kingies they sell as either the pink form or the white form of the species, look somewhere else.