Hippeastrum amaryllis

I have been preparing for this evening's first meeting of an important working group of the council which I will be chairing. We will only have six meetings before we present the case to the council for a big project. I have been rather side-tracked by it all.

The fog began to slowly clear after lunch today, so when I returned from the council offices where I'd had been preparing documents and the agenda I noticed that this plant's flowers had opened even further than this morning. Every year we wait for the amazing unfurling of the Amaryllis. I wanted to get a blip of it before its four big trumpet flowers wholly open. Each of the four flowers will probably be at least six inches in length on the end of a stem which is nearly three feet high.

Monty Don, the presenter of Gardener's World has said:
The name comes from the Greek hippeus – knight – and astron – star – after the resemblance of the flower to the knight’s star, a medieval weapon also known as the morning star.

Hippeastrum come from Central and South America and are members of the amaryllis family, which also includes snowdrops, snowflakes (leucojum) and daffodils from the northern hemisphere, and clivia, crinums and nerines from South Africa – as well as the one amaryllis that grows reliably well in gardens, A. belladonna, the belladonna lily.