Only a few hundred different gingers in several different familys ..Alpinia , Bosenbergia ,Curcuma , Costus , Dimerocostus ,Etlingera , Hedychium and more .... some have big impressive long lasting inflorescences , some tiny fleeting flowers .

oh, I don't see Katharine's name mentioned...:( :(

LOL Annie.
Have they done OK before or was this the first year of flowering/attempted flowering?
If you've had them in a few years they may be a bit cramped and do with breaking up and re-starting.
Otherwise they might be getting too much shade, or, have just been overwhelmed by the wet summer. Try some "bloom booster" next spring.

Hi, Alison, yes, this is their first year of flowering...or rather, attempting to flower. I suspect there may be something wrong with the soil. There's a few outside influences at work there ie neighbour and swimming pool!!
Except for a large variegated ginger which is going great guns, these are my first attempts. My niece had a lovely garden at her old house and one day just said that she was thinning out her garden and did I want some? and she handed me 2 grocery bags full of corms? is that the word? I had no idea what size they grew or what colour? so I put them in the garden then sat back and waited.
I'm afraid I'm guilty of being lazy and hopeful at the same time. I was too lazy to do my own homework and I was hopeful that there would be an easy remedy.
Oh, well, back to the drawing board...or in this case, Google!!
thanks, Alison.

If your niece could give you a clue as to what it was, you could narrow it down a bit. Which would be useful in another way as you don't want anything TOO vigorous, I've recently spent about a day trying to chop down shell ginger that has taken over.
A lot of them are reasonably shallow-growing (the rhyzomes) but the roots go deeper and don't much like wet feet. They will take shade for part of the day but flower better if they get more sun. Smaller varieties, or smaller pieces, might just have needed more time to establish and not be ready to flower so soon. The only probs I've had really are with some above-ground pests (aphids etc) and on some, invasion of creepies into the older parts of rhyzomes that had passed their UBD so got a bit rotted. The pool salt issue might be a cause, perhaps you could lift a few bits and dry in pots instead

If you could post some photos that would help. I suspect/guess they might be Beehive Ginger. Those, and some others as well, have flowers open randomly rather than all at once. What you're seeing as 'petals' may actually be flowers.

Hi, all, I'll try to post some more photos. Most of the wanna-be flowers have gone but I found a couple. My niece gave the pieces several years ago now and this was the first year that anything resembling a flower had appeared.
{{gwi:2112806}}

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if this worked, you can see how it's trying to "open"? but it just doesn't make it.
hope this works! :)

The top one is a Costus. Individual flowers open out of the cone. That can happen quickly and you might miss then over a few days, or "things" may have gotten to them like snails or slugs, they are very juicy.
Costus are one of the few gingers that can be propagated from stem cuttings, so you could cut off any that look a bit ratty, trim them down a bit and pop in a pot of water and you should get roots.
Just read up a bit and see if you can find anything that helps with their conditions as to light or more photosphorous type fertilizer. Looks nice and tropical anyway.
Have you still got that rocking chair?

thanks Alison.
I had the rocking chair for a few years and then we bought a new lounge suite and there was just no room so it had to go. :( It was lovely and comfortable.
I'll do some googling and see what I can find.
cheers