Hippeastrum

Lovely to see this in flower, Wylie! I have 3 in the kitchen that are flowering right now as well. One is from my son & daughter-in-law for Christmas 2022 & is flowering this year for a 2nd time 👏 The other two are offsets I've been growing on for a couple of years & are flowering perhaps for the 2nd time as well! 👏

Tomorrow or the next day, Hippeastrum cybister 'Sumatra' will be open. I just finished transplanting a bunch of cybister hybrids I did last year. And I'm waiting for a xAmercrinum to open. That is a cross between my white Amaryllis belladonna and a white crinum. They can bloom at any time, unlike the Amaryllis parent which is in the fall.

As I don't have any of these plants I can't do crosses like you do but it is something that has always interested me since a child when I tried to cross a Parrot Tulip with a Daffodil! 🤣

What it takes is being familiar with chromosome counts. Sounds hard, but I use https://taux.evolseq.net/CCDB_web
and if the numbers are the same, they have a good chance of crossing. It also explains why some don't cross. A parrot tulip has 12 chromosomes while a daffodil can have 7 or 11. A tulip is in the Liliaceae family, while the Narcissus are in the Amaryllidaceae family. It can get fussy!

Thanks for the info, Wylie! I already know a little about the chromosomes but I've never tried to get more info because I've never been that interested. I've successfully crossed a few plants in my time & grown the seeds on but I've never taken it as seriously as you.

I was happy when a lady from the USA sent me some pollen from her Amaryllis which I used to fertilise some of mine. I grew some of the resulting seeds on till they flowered a few years later & was quite pleased with one colour, a cherry red I'd not seen before in Amaryllis, but I would never consider trying to obtain new hybrids & name them. Apart from that one I mentioned above all the rest were no different from the parent plants.

Nevertheless, I'm still interested in the creation of new hybrids. If it weren't for the EU laws I'd consider asking you for a few of your seed crosses with the Amaryllis family of plants.

Brexit messed up things for some of us. You'd be surprised how often I read on a forum for EU members of the Pacific Bulb Society that refer to bulbs bought before Brexit. We got together last year and placed an order for seeds from South Africa, all of us sharing the cost of the phytosanitary certificate to make the seeds affordable. Now I have some new bulbs growing that will be fantastic when they finally get big enough to bloom.

You are right, Brexit certainly spoilt a lot of things for us! 😠