Amarillys

Beautiful....

Gorgeous

Its lovely Sid

thats beautiful

This is really stunning :o)

There it is!!! Gorgeous...I'm thinking...these plants would be great to collect! hardly any work involved and they pay off with flowers like these!!

This is a lovely one Sid, and hopefully mine will be like this. I bought a bulb in the sales....a white one....but so far I just have 3 leaves! :o(

Lori - funny you should say that - I've just had an e-mail from a friend who is offering to send me a rather lovely yellow one!

Janey - that's strange...I've got no leaves at all, just one stout stem with these flowers perched on top! Maybe yours needs to build up some strength before it flowers? I'm surprised mine has done so well - it was a bit of a shrivelled old bulb with mouldy bits attached - but I couldn't very well do anything about it as it was a Christmas prezzie.....'oh yes, how lovely, thank you so much for the manky old bulb!' ha ha ha...

Ha...ha.....Sid......as they say....Never judge a book by it's cover! Yours looked manky but had hidden talents. Mine looked the biz, but was empty inside! lol

Ah yes, there is a definate moral to all this...??!! As a wise old Chinaman might have said, 'he who buy manky Amaryllis, get plenty big flower.' x-)

Or "he who buy big bulb........get big bulb!"..............

Just a mention of something I've observed...of the three plants that I have growing the one in full flower is the one with NO leaves!! wonder if I should remove the leaves til it's finished flowering? would that weaken the bulb?

Not sure Lori...........I left mine standing in water for an hour yesterday....and Hey Presto today I have a bud peeping up! I think they need the leaves to nourish the bulb...if you are going to keep it.

My friend who is sending me some bulbs of a yellow one said that it behaves differently from others in that it flowers later in the spring and produces flowers and leaves at the same time - perhaps yours is like that one? Personally, I wouldn't remove the leaves, but I think I would feed it as it obviously trying to grow and build itself up to something- hopefully flowering!

So there are Papilios of different colours, then. Did you see the one I had in flower a short while ago? It came up with no leaves, and it was red/green/cream stripes! The one I got last year didn't flower, but the leaves have stayed on. It hasn't flowered this year, either. I am feeding it. Both bulbs were much smaller than the usual size.

Yours is lovely, Sid!

I expect they take a few years to get up to flowering size - some bulbs I've seen for sale are huge monsters! I will look for your picture Barbara :-)

You can keep these bulbs in leaf all year, which is needed when they are young to build them up. However, by the end of summer the older bulbs want to rest, so withhold watering and let them dry off totally , this is when next years flowers are formed ready for the spring/summer season. The leaves are needed to provide this energy so please don't chop 'em off!! Start watering only when you see a new shoot coming...easy!

I've never seen a white one! Beautiful - I'll look out for one to grow next year.

Thank you for that Chloris! A friend is sending me some immature bulbs - so do you think I should keep those in leaf all year until I think they are up to flowering size? They haven't arrived yet, so I don't know quite how big they are yet.

Yes Sid if you can keep them going ,do,sometimes they want to die back naturally but as long as you don't overwater them they should be fine. The ones I grow from seed decided to have a winter rest this year but as I've moved recently I might have forgotten to water them so they went into dormancy anyway!

Thanks Chloris :-) My friend's bulbs arrived yesterday - they are the size of small daff bulbs and are mostly in the green, so I will try to keep them going :-) Would you suggest I keep them indoors or outdoors in the summer? I have an unheated greenhouse - would it be too warm for them in there in the summer I wonder?