Amaryllis is a bulb, and an interesting one - you have to plant it with the top of the bulb above the dirt, and it's not terribly attractive until its leaves start to grow, long and green. Last year, after I received the bulb as a gift and planted it, its leaves grew and it attempted to bloom. Sadly, the flower died before fully opening, but true to a bulb, the leaves stayed green and kept growing for several more months.
I'm not a botanist by any means, so I'm a bit out of my territory here, but one of the cool things about bulbs is that you can encourage them to bloom again if you put them in the right conditions. I don't know the plant biochemistry that effects this (although I'd guess it probably has something to do with the regulation of chlorophyll in the plant's cells, or something like that!), and I didn't really know much about the right conditions for amaryllis, but had heard that you could put it in the dark for a few weeks after the last leaves died to encourage it to bloom. So, I put the pot on an empty shelf in a closet. I left it there for, oh, probably 8-10 weeks or so, and occasionally watered it. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I opened the closet door to find the plant's leaves growing again, with what appeared to be a flower stalk beginning to form. I pulled it out and left it on the bathroom counter, and sure enough, this week, two lovely, big, pink flowers opened.
I was thinking about this, and it struck me as rather appropriate that the amaryllis bloomed right at the beginning of Lent. A reminder that beautiful things come out of darkness and dryness - two things that are often companions in our spiritual lives - and that I have sometimes felt more intensely during Lent.
I'll leave my thoughts here for today, and leave you with a pic of that lovely amaryllis:
+peace, and all good+
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