I have kind of a “thing” for amaryllis. As you know, if you read this regularly, I
blogged about a couple of plants that bloomed very, very well recently. What I didn’t tell you is that we have four
bulbs all together that we’ve collected over the years. I did mention one that hasn’t bloomed in a
long while, but we also have another one.
That one is a bulb we got a year or two ago. After it bloomed, we let it leaf out and we
cared for it the rest of the summer. I
put it away in a dark, cool place for awhile last fall and got it out, along
with one or two other bulbs, sometime in November of last year.
Both bulbs had a hint of green on their top, so I knew both
were viable. We put them in the window
and watered. The one bulb started
growing leaves, but didn’t bloom, rather quickly…I’d say within a couple of
weeks. The other bulb just sat
there. The green on the top continued to
stay about the same, but nothing else happened.
We were wondering if something was wrong with the bulb. Then just a few days ago, we saw the hint of
the tip of something coming out of the top of the bulb. The next day it was clear that what was
emerging was a flowering shoot. This
will be the first time I have been able to make an amaryllis re-bloom in a year
following purchasing one.
Why it waited so long to come out, I don’t know. The other bulbs started relatively soon after
watering and putting in a sunny place.
And why this one will bloom when the other one, which I treated the same
as this one, produced only leaves, I don’t know either.
I thought about these two bulbs when I went back to the
kitchen at the church to get a cherry turnover someone had graciously left
there. There were two or three in the
box, and I got to thinking about the mass production of those and how, if you
do the same thing in the same way, you’ll get the same results each time…a
perfect cherry turnover. Except that
with flower bulbs, that evidently doesn’t work, because I treated two amaryllis
bulbs the same. One bloomed. One didn’t.
One started growing right away.
One waited two months to start.
I don’t know that there is any great and glorious eternal lesson
I can learn from this. It’s more a
matter of understanding that living things, including people, don’t always
conform to the accepted ways that things are done and we just have to know and
understand that and work with and within it.
Life is a complex thing, whether in the form of a bulb or a baby, and we
continue to marvel at what we see and yet don’t understand.
I think that’s one reason I so enjoy the orb spiders in the
fall of the year when they spin giant webs at the corners of houses or in
doorways or between limbs of trees and bushes.
These seemingly simple life forms have within their DNA the capacity to
create a material that, pound for pound is ten times stronger than steel, yet
has great flexibility and “stretchiness”.
They then weave this material into a true work of art that at the same
time is critical for the survival of the next generation. Tell me that isn’t complex and I’ll sell you
the Brooklyn Bridge.
Getting back to the amaryllis, I don’t remember what color
the blooms are on this plant just starting, but we will be able to enjoy a
late-blooming work of art for the next several weeks as we watch it grow and
mature. And maybe, just maybe this
coming fall, somehow all four of our bulbs will come out of the closet
downstairs and bloom their hearts out again for us. It’s worth looking forward to.
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