The Undead Amaryllis

We're making some changes to how things are stored at work, so I figured it would be a good time to get some of the personal stuff I'd stored there back home where it belongs. I pulled all the folders out, dumped them in a zip drive, and started unpacking them at home, where my filing system is a bit more involved than just by year. Ran across the below blurb I wrote for a friend/(now ex-)coworker's blog, and figured I'd share, because it still amuses me.

My erstwhile and enthusiastic coworker has, I think, a bit of an elevated opinion about my gardening skills, which tend more toward the “let’s see what happens… hey, it worked!” side of things than the “I know what I’m doing, and it worked because of that” end of the spectrum. Still, I will admit that things do tend to work out for the most part, such as when we received an amaryllis bulb at work. 

Typically, when contractors or consultants send us Christmas gifts, it’s along the lines of chocolate, cookies, or treats – consumables and temporary items. For whatever reason, one of them gave us an amaryllis bulb in a pot two Christmases ago [2015]. I claimed it for my desk (logical, since I’m the only one not sitting next to a window, very smart), and we got a month or two of lovely red flowers out of it. 

Typically, I believe the thing to do with Christmas plants after they finish blooming is to toss them, but I’d never had an amaryllis before (and I dislike getting rid of plants), so I looked up what to do with it so it would bloom next year. The instructions were pretty precise, but I take many gardening instructions as suggestions, so I figured I’d give it a go and see what happened. 

I read that you have to kill it off around late summer so that it can be dormant over fall and revive in winter to bloom again. How hard can it be to kill a plant, right? We do it all the time, unintentionally - can’t be too difficult, right? 

Wrong. 

I stopped watering the bulb around August. The leaves started yellowing and drooping after 2-3 weeks (which is stupidly long for a large plant in a small pot), and I eventually just folded them up, stuffed the whole pot and plant in a thick bag, brought it home, and put it in a dark corner by the a/c vent to cool it down and deprive it of light and water. Every few weeks I’d check on it, and the dang thing would still be hanging on, little traces of green and yellow in the slowly dying leaves.

Once the weather got cold (-ish, this has been the warmest winter we’ve had in a while, I think), I put it outside under the porch to complete the kill. I know, I know, it’s not hyper-controlled humidity, ultra-darkness, or pinpoint temperature control, but…. plants have been growing for millions of years, perfect isn’t necessary. As they say, out of sight, out of mind, and I promptly forgot all about the undead amaryllis.

In late December, a warning went off in my head to check on the bulb. It was just about time to bring it in, warm it up, water it, and give it sunlight to fool it into thinking it was spring and time to bloom again. I went down under the porch, grabbed the bag, opened it up and…..

The dang thing was still alive. 

Four months of no water. Three months of no light, and two months of wildly fluctuating temperatures (including down into freezing a time or two), and the dang thing was still alive. The leaves had died back to about 1” above the bulb, but that last one inch was just as green and happy as could be. 

The instructions said that, when it was ready for spring, you’d see a flower stalk forming in the center. There was no sign of new growth, but since time was running out for it to flower during the winter, I brought it in, added more dirt to the pot, put it in the window, and watered it sparingly. After a week or so, new leaves started pushing up out of the center, and I figured I’d messed things up enough that flowers wouldn’t happen. I don’t mind greenery in the middle of winter, though, so I kept watering it and enjoyed the fan of tropical leaves. 

Four weeks later, darn if a little flower head didn’t sprout out the side of the bulb, and start a race to the top. As if determined to make up for lost time, it took just over two weeks to grow about two feet tall and throw out some beautiful winter flowers. 

So yeah, it turned out well, I look like I have the faintest clue what I’m doing, and we get another year of bright cheerful flowers in the middle of the oddest dang winter I’ve seen. Here’s to the undead amaryllis living for another year. 

[Afternote - once the flowers died off, we went to trim the stem at the base and water literally POURED out of the hollow stem. As in, swear-to-goodness left a puddle of water on the desk. I suspect the darn thing stored water in its leaves, too, which is why it lived so long.]