Difference between Anglo-American and Ordinary hybrid Amaryllis

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As several of you ask about the difference between my “ordinary” hybrid Amaryllis & my “Anglo-American” hybrids I’ll explain again, though I think I’ve really explained a few times before!

(The 4 scapes in the middle of these two photos are Anglo-American hybrids, only the end two are older Amaryllis hybrids)

The “ordinary” hybrids are the ones I’ve been growing from my own seeds since before I joined GoY back in April 2009! (One of the first blogs I ever wrote on GoY was about growing Amaryllis from seed!)

These came about because in 2001 I bought 3 Amaryllis bulbs from a Dutch trader in what was the very first International Market held in Huntingdon. These were unnamed, unpacked bulbs I bought in a street market. These bulbs grew & flowered for several years until one year it occurred to me to try & cross-fertilize them & try to get some viable seed. I’d tried some years before when we still lived in Cuenca, Spain. At that time none of the seeds germinated. This time I had an overwhelming number of seeds that germinated!

After 4 years these flowered for the first time & I used a photo of me standing in front of them all, (now we call them “selfies”, back then we called them “self portraits”!), flowering on our living room table, as my avatar photo on GoY for many years.

Then, in 2012, a lady, on another gardening forum I also post on, sent me some, unsolicited, pollen from her Amaryllis. As I had some in flower when it arrived I tried cross-fertilizing some of my plants with the pollen. Only one bulb gave me a couple of seedpods full of seeds. I sowed some & sent some to the lady in the USA who’d sent me the pollen.

(Unfortunately she has never told me if she sowed them nor if they have grown or flowered for her :-(( )

When these germinated I thought I need some way of identifying them in the future as they all look a like & to be able to send a “progress report” to the lady in the USA. The name “Anglo-American hybrids” came to my mind, as, after all, the pollen came from the USA but the bulbs from the UK.

So there you have it – in a (rather big) nutshell! – why some are just simply called “Amaryllis hybrids” & others are called *"Anglo-American hybrids"*.

Of the “Anglo-American hybrids” I currently have 4 bulbs on our living room table, one of which has opened its first flower today for the first time since sowing 4 years ago! There are 3 more in bud, one of which will flower in a day or two, while there are two others which will still take a few more days. While, in the bedroom, on the windowsill, there are more bulbs with scapes at differing heights which will flower during February.

I have 20 pots of these “Anglo-American hybrids” in all! One has finished flowering, one is opening today & several more will be opening their flowers for the first time ever as the week progresses.

The photos I’ve included in this blog are for illustrative purposes really as most of my photos from the past few years are still locked away on the hard disk of my old desktop computer which I have no access to. :-((

Some of them, nevertheless, are relevant to what I’ve written in this blog. As they all have the date they were taken on them you will easily see which photos relate to the present time.

• 25 Jan, 2016
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