The in vitro cultivation of gloxinia produced vigorous plants with well-developed shoots suitable for the present research work.
The pattern of gloxinia flower exposure (Figure
1) shows that all plants treated with SA flowered 24 d
after the last application, while the control plants did not reach
flowering until day 33. Thereafter, the rate of flowering
was similar in all treatments, but by the end of this study (76
d after last application of SA) the control plants had exposed
only eight flowers while the plants treated with SA had
produced 10 to 11 flowers, without significant differences
(P ≤ 0.05) among treated plants. Therefore, the application
of SA increased the number of flowers per plant by 25 to
37 %, compared to the control plants. Besides inducing an
earlier flowering and a greater number of flowers per plant,
the SA treatments also increased flower size, in particular
with the 1.0 µM SA concentration, which produced flowers
17 % longer and 11 % wider (Figure 2).