River Lodge Gardens

First plant I’ll mention gets here not because its that rare but because flowering seems to be rare, Amaryllis belladonna. It would be a little hard for me to remember exactly how long we’ve had this but I do remember where I got some of the bulbs. Some came 15 years or more ago from Trago Mills garden center in the UK (back before Brexit when you could bring bulbs in from there) and some others in the garden came from Lidl.

It had been growing for so long and in what I thought were ideal conditions, good soil, good drainage, full sun with some shelter, that the original bulbs has multiplied and were massive. The photograph in flower was taken at the end of September 2023 (28/9/2023).

The obvious question is how hardy is it? Well all I can do is tell you the conditions its been through here at River Lodge. We’ve had weather so cold one winter that the ground was frozen for 2 weeks and for that time the roads were so bad we couldn’t drive up either of the roads up from the cove. We get regular freezes that kill off anything that is slightly tender, along with strong winds and salt spray off the sea.

So worth a try if you see them in Lidl and don’t mind a lot of green foliage that seems to do nothing for year.

These are some of the bulbs that I dug up simply because the clump had got so massive and because I wanted to find a better position for them. The original bulbs I planted would have been no more than 5 cm in diameter.

Unfortunately there is no obvious scale in this picture but the larger bulbs were over 15cm in diameter.

Of course the plant flowered after I’d dug most of it up and I’ll probably have to wait another 15 years for these bulbs to flower where I’ve transplanted them.

This is what I was left with and its the clump on the right which produced the flowers.

As you can see from the flowering picture their is no foliage when they flower. The foliage starts early in the spring and is gone before the beginning of August.

While the growing conditions could be said to be good I wouldn’t call them ideal. One reason for digging up some of them was to try them in other locations in the garden. The main one is on the top of a bank that is very well drained and in full baking sun during the summer. Hopefully better drainage and a good baking will increase the amount of flowering.

A few plants went into a neighbors garden where I think there are even better growing conditions. Only time will tell.