The Amaryllis Blooms for February

Earlier this week on Facebook I posted a photo of a single amaryllis blossom-- the first to come out on our gloomy, sleety Tuesday. Yesterday there were four blooms, although because of my camera angle, only three can be seen here.

The plant came from Norm's mother, who had one similar to this going all the way back to their days on the farm in Western Kansas. At least 60 years, maybe 70, by my reckoning. In the summer the pot containing it would go outside; I remember seeing it just outside the back door of their house in Colby, in the shade of the climbing rose trellis. The rest of the year it resided indoors and in the winter would send up multiple stalks, sometimes bearing 4 or 5 buds. The salmon color always struck me as unusual, because the potted amarylli you can buy in the winter in garden centers and hardware stores are usually red, rose, or white. Close to 40 years ago Mom gave me my very own bulb and over the years it has multiplied many times and I have shared it with myiad friends. I know that my sisters-in-law all have their own bulbs and we often compare notes to see whose plant is blooming first. Sometimes it has bloomed at Christmas, often in January around my birthday. This year this plant, the first of several I have, waited until Ground Hog Day. Another one is sending up a stalk that will bloom for Valentine's Day. Several others just seem to be waiting. I think they want to be repotted. It's hard for amarylli to be too crowded, but I think a actually have one pot that is. It's tricky because if you give them too much room between themselves and the side of the pot, they won't bloom at all. About an inch between the bulb and wall of the pot is the best.

This amaryllis is atypical in that all the leaves never die off at once, like most varieties do, and it never really goes into hibernation only to send up a flower in advance of new leaves. It sports shiny green leaves all year round, but when the oldest leaf starts to yellow, and then dry up, I start looking for the flower stalk. It is as though the leaf if dying and pouring all its nutrients into the flower. Two or three more leaves may do this as the flower emerges.

I have two other varieties of amaryllis. One is a gorgeous, fragrant rose and white beauty that a friend gave me years ago. It has only bloomed two years out of all the time I have had it. It probably needs something it isn't getting. Another is a creamy white/yellow variety that is very prolific...bulbs multiply like crazy and I have shared those, too. It is the kind that likes to lose all its leaves and sleep for a while in the winter before it blooms. I have some offshoots of it that have been asleep in their pots for over a year, so I'm not sure what will wake them up. Yet the bulbs are still firm so I know they are alive, in there, somewhere. A few years ago I had several of these creamy ones planted together in a plastic pot, and they expanded so much during the summer on the porch that they split it in two. Needless to say, that got my attention and I found two new pots and fresh potting soil to resettle them.

I believe the Latin name for our lovely salmon amaryllis is Hippeastrum striatum. I found a blooming specimen in the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden with this name years ago. I'm not a botanist but the plant had exactly the same size, color and habit as ours. It was in bloom with several leaves on, in late January, in a ground level bed in the Garden's famed geodesic-domed greenhouse. The plant is a native of Brazil. I have no clue as to how a flowering bulb native to Brazil could have wound up on a window sill in Western Kansas sometime in the 1940s or 50s, and if anyone has a theory, please let me know. One of the color slides from the farm days shows it blooming on a kitchen window sill, and Norm remembers it being there in his childhood. Like so many stories, it raises more questions that may never be answered. But this amaryllis is a lovely reminder of my dear mother-in-law, of the ties that bind generation to generation, and the fact that some plants will probably outlive us all.