At the beginning of January we brought our three Amaryllis plants up from the basement where they’d had a two and a half month dormant period.
Other than the few pale leaves that they had growing at the time I didn’t expect more than leaf growth until the end of February or the beginning of March. After that I expected March blooms.
Two plants seem to be sticking to the plan, but one decided to send up a flower shoot only a week after I’d brought it upstairs into my sunny kitchen.
By January 23rd their was a flower bud on the Amaryllis’ stock and it was just beginning to open:
The next day the flower bud split in two and looked like a lobster claw for a few hours. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of it when it was like that. I was instead surprised to see how fast it went from partially open bud to this:
Three days after the bud had first started to open I discovered that the first flower was beginning to bloom (Jan. 26th):
Only hours after the first flower started to open the second one opened as well:
By January 27th, only four days after the bud began to open, all four flowers were fully open and HUGE!
Each flower was probably almost the size of a small bread plate! I didn’t get a photo of all four flowers in bloom this year though … Chris ended up being admitted to the hospital on the 31st and all photo taking stopped for a while. By the time things were ok health wise the flowers were pretty much done blooming. Oh well.
By the way this Amaryllis is the one I inherited from my parents. It’s a vibrant red/orange. My other two have white petals tinged with coral, peach and pink – like this.
Do you have any flowers blooming in your home right now? I just wrote a post on my main blog Tricia’s Musings about how we’ve pretty much been treated to flowers indoors and outdoors all year round over the past year.