Trumpet majors

The magnificent new glasshouse display at West Dean, West Sussex, shows why it's time that hippeastrums came in from the cold, says John Hoyland

THE ultimate degradation for plants is to find themselves being sold on a service-station forecourt: chrysanthemums in a cellophane shroud, over-fed cyclamen in foil baskets and, at this time of the year, glittery boxes of dried-up amaryllis bulbs. These bulbs are not even named correctly: true amaryllis are South African plants, hardy in much of the UK, with a brief, but beautiful flowering in the autumn. What are being sold and what, to the irritation of botanists, we all refer to as amaryllis, are, in fact, hippeastrum. The name was changed in the late 1980s, but most people—growers and breeders included— continue to refer to the plant by its former name. Perhaps a first step in liberating the amaryllis’ from its shelf at the service station might be to call it by its correct moniker.

Few plants are as flamboyant as hippeastrum: floriferous and long flowering, they would be welcome at any time of year, but to have their exuberance during the dull grey days of winter seems almost miraculous. It is unfathomable that such a plant is dismissed, in some quarters, as old-fashioned or disparaged for being too ostentatious.