Amaryllis
Red Lion
“Buy the fattest bulb you can find in November, pot it up, and watch. Six weeks of slow-burn anticipation, then January gets the drama it deserves.”
— ROSIE
Rosie's Take
There's a week between Christmas and New Year when the house is full of leftover chocolate, the tree is starting to drop needles, and everything feels slightly deflated. That's when my amaryllis opens, and the whole room remembers what drama looks like.
Red Lion is the classic — an enormous, trumpet-shaped bloom in the deepest, richest scarlet you've ever seen, on a thick, architectural stem that grows so fast you can almost watch it happen. I've measured an inch of growth in a single day. The whole performance, from the first green nose poking out of the bulb to the first flower opening, takes about six weeks. It's the most rewarding countdown in gardening.
Each stem carries three or four blooms, each one easily six inches across, and the colour is extraordinary — not a flat, plastic red but a deep, living scarlet with darker veining and a velvety texture that catches lamplight in a way that makes the room feel warmer. On a dark January evening, lit by a single lamp, she's incandescent.
I buy the fattest bulbs I can find in November, pot them up, and put them on the kitchen windowsill. The anticipation is part of the pleasure. Watching that stem emerge and climb, knowing what's coming, is a slow-burn thrill that the post-Christmas slump genuinely needs.
They're often dismissed as a cliché — the poinsettia's louder cousin. But a single well-grown Red Lion in a terracotta pot on a dark winter table is anything but cliché. It's a reminder that the natural world hasn't gone anywhere, even when everything outside is brown and bare. That matters, in January.
Where to Buy
If you want to try amaryllis for yourself, here's where I'd point you:
“The Blossomist do gorgeous potted amaryllis in winter — beautifully presented in a proper terracotta pot, already started, so you skip the waiting and go straight to the drama.”
Order This Flower →“Appleyard carry amaryllis stems through the winter months — those enormous heads in a bunch are about as dramatic as a delivered flower gets. A seriously impressive gift.”
Order This Flower →✿ From the folklore cabinet
Amaryllis is named after a shepherdess in Greek poetry who pierced her own heart with a golden arrow to prove her love — the flowers that grew from her blood were crimson. I think about that every January, watching mine open. There's something appropriate about a flower born from determination arriving in the bleakest month.
