Quite a few of my older amaryllis bulbs have been blooming with unusually short stems this year, including these two and the budding one lurking behind them.
They’re typically marketed as Christmas presents and bloom around the winter holidays on towering two- to three-foot stalks, their leaves lasting eight months or so. Then you quit watering them, let them rest for one and a half to three months, start up again and wait for them to rebloom. Rinse, rest, repeat.
I like to have some in full flower as far into the year as I can, so I stretch out the drying-out periods to stagger the timing; last year I had flowers all the way to the end of May. Cool!
So. Around the middle of this past December, I did a mass watering of my several dozen older bulbs to get them started, knowing some would respond quickly, some slower.
But I was already three weeks into my Crohn’s flare, and as many know, it got bad fast after that. Carrying heavy pitchers of water around was something that got given up real fast. I worried about killing my bulbs off–one watering in the middle of five months? But there was not a thing I could do about it. And they just were not the first thing on anyone else’s mind during those days, as one might well imagine.
Mom eventually planted the ones Dad gave me for my birthday and took on the watering.
My older bulbs could have put all their energy into sheer survival mode, green only. Some did. But some, with the beginnings of buds already formed inside the bulbs, were determined to bloom the moment it became possible, however it could be done.
And those are the ones with the short stems now, giving it all they’ve got.
Lene? The bulb you gave me a year ago started to send up its first two leaves right away, then they died off in the drought. I started watering it anyway when I could again. It took it weeks to respond, long enough that I wasn’t sure why I was still trying, but now it’s got two unusually wide, healthy young leaves making up for lost time.
Amaryllises need four leaves producing food for the bulb for them to bloom the next year.
I can wait.
I’ve got all the time in the world now.