Life must be filled up

I potted up this amaryllis a few days after Christmas and voilà, in about six weeks it’s grown and produced three lovely flowers (should be four). It never ceases to amaze me that such a big plant grows so quickly from a knobbly brown lump.

I’m posting this in a brief interval when my broadband is working. It was on the blink all day yesterday and this morning, had disappeared altogether and my landline phones don’t work. I spent over half an hour with BT on my mobile and was eventually told that ‘the fault is outside your property’ which at least means I won’t have to pay to get it fixed. But it may take two to three days! This is very miserable. Pouring with rain, too:-(

The garden is sodden today and the view from the window a grey one but on the windowsill is this cheerful amaryllis, or hippeastrum if you want to be more correct. It has two flowers with two more to come. Ideally, of course, you want a tall, straight stem with four flowers out at once. The wonder of this particular plant is that the pot spent the entire winter in a cold greenhouse, exposed to frost.

I've grown lots of different forms of this plant and I'm always amazed that such extraordinary blooms come from a dull, brown bulb. Such wonderful colours and stripes! Those crystalline petals that hardly look real! Just what is needed on an English summer's day.