The Amaryllis That Stays
Thanks to mass marketing across the nation, most of us think of amaryllis only as forced product for Christmas — a bulb in a box, a bloom on the kitchen counter, and then the trash. But many Houstonians and avid gardeners along the Gulf Coast and in California know that amaryllis will come back for them every year as perennials.
And moving into colder country — in some areas even zone 7 — gardeners are well aware of one amaryllis that overwinters: the April/May blooming red and white striped garden amaryllis found in old heirloom gardens all over the South. That’s this one. Many amaryllis perform well along the coastal regions, but few match this bulb in its ability to withstand cold temperatures and poor soils.
One of the most exciting and underutilized garden bulbs there is. And, as it turns out, one of the most historically important plants I sell.
A Maker of Gold Watch Hands in Prescot
The oldest account we have of this plant is also the best one, and it’s close to the source: the Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London, volume 4, 1822, printing what John Shepherd — curator of the Liverpool Botanic Garden, who got his bulbs from Johnson himself — had to say about it.
Mr. Johnson, it tells us, “was a manufacturer of the gold hands of watches, and resided at Prescot, about eight miles from Liverpool.” Not a watchmaker — a man who made the gold hands that went on watches, which is a finer and stranger trade than the one the story usually gives him. Mrs. Edward Bury, writing in 1831, says the same thing. His first name doesn’t appear in either account, and I’m not going to supply one.
Around 1799 he raised the seedlings that are generally held to be the first Hippeastrum hybrid ever made. Not the first good one. The first one. Everything that has happened in amaryllis breeding since — every Dutch hybrid in every Christmas box in every grocery store in America — traces back to that greenhouse in a Lancashire town, in the last year of the eighteenth century.
Now, the parentage. The plant we grow appears to be Hippeastrum reginae crossed with H. vittatum — Gowen deliberately made that cross at Highclere in 1821 and got something you couldn’t tell apart from garden ‘Johnsonii’. But Johnson himself said he had crossed vittatum with Sprekelia formosissima, and that cross isn’t possible. So he made a plant that changed the genus, and he was wrong about what he’d made. The 1822 account puts it plainly: the hybrid origin is beyond controversy, “but the tradition of the Liverpool garden to be incorrect, so far as regards its true parentage.” He didn’t know. He got it anyway.
Then comes the part I can’t stop thinking about. In 1802, an accident destroyed Johnson’s greenhouse — the record says accident, not fire, and doesn’t say what kind, so neither will I. Most of the plants were lost. “Only five or six bulbs were saved; of these, two were given at the time to Mr. Shepherd, one to a gentleman in the neighbourhood, and the remainder to Mr. Lee of Hammersmith.”
Read that sequence carefully, because it usually gets told backwards. The bulbs came through the accident on Johnson’s own place. Then he gave them away. He didn’t have to. He’d just lost his greenhouse and had five or six bulbs left of the best thing he’d ever done, and he handed four or five of them to other people. Shepherd’s flowered in Liverpool by 1802 and he bred from them, and the London nurserymen got their plants from the Liverpool collection. That’s why it exists. Not because it was saved from anything — because a man who’d just lost nearly everything gave away most of what was left.
How It Got to the South
The bulb reached the United States probably sometime in the 1830s, and it found its people. It went outdoors, into southern gardens, where the winters were mild enough that a bulb with a little mountain blood in it could just stay in the ground and come back.
Then the trade moved on. Showier hybrids arrived — bigger flowers, more colors, and far more tender — and the commercial growers dropped Johnson’s amaryllis. That should have been the end of it.
It wasn’t, because it had already escaped into the hands of ordinary gardeners. For most of a century this plant survived in the South as a passalong — dug, divided, handed over the fence, carried to a new house, planted at a new homesite, given to a daughter. No catalog, no marketing, no nursery. Just people who thought enough of it to give a piece away. It’s called Johnson’s amaryllis for the man in Prescot, and along the Gulf Coast — New Orleans especially — it’s the St. Joseph’s lily, because it blooms around his feast day in March.
The heirloom bulb movement of the 1990s finally brought it back to the wider gardening world after almost two centuries of obscurity. It never went anywhere. We just stopped looking.
The Blooms
The striking red trumpet shaped blooms with their white stripes are show stoppers in every sense of the word. Four to six of them on a stout, hollow scape that pushes up out of the bulb, each flower to about five inches across. It grows 18 to 24 inches tall and blooms in April and May.
Gardeners in Texas who’ve had them form massive clumps with an explosion of red color will still tell you it’s the best hybrid on the market. And here’s the remarkable part — even in such large clumps, the bloom capacity is not hindered in any way. Most bulbs get stingy when they’re crowded. This one doesn’t.
Hint: if you lean in close enough, you’ll catch a slight spicy fragrance that is simply the icing on the cake, and makes these gorgeous blooms amazing as cut flowers.
The leaves run to about two inches wide and two feet long, and take on a bronze cast when grown in sun. The foliage yellows and dies down in late summer. In milder areas it may come back up in fall and overwinter green.
How Cold Can They Get?
That is a great question, and I’d rather answer it with what I’ve watched than with a number off a tag.
During our major freeze near the farm in 2021, we reached 0 degrees for an extended period of time. Hardy amaryllis that were close to structures did fine. Any that were exposed out in an open field did not come back.
Neil Sperry, up in McKinney north of Dallas, has mentioned a freeze in the past that killed a good number in the city there — but at the same time he spoke of many that came back and weren’t affected at all.
In conclusion: zone 7 is pushing it, and as you get warmer from there you should be okay. If you’re ever unsure, don’t be afraid to give them a good layer of mulch over the winter, and plant them on the south or west side of a structure. That wall is worth more than a zone number.
There’s a botanical reason it can do this at all. Of its two parents, H. vittatum comes off the Peruvian-Bolivian side of the genus, where the species grow at elevation — as high as several thousand feet. Depending on how far up the mountain the original collection came from, that’s very likely where the winter hardiness in this hybrid comes from. A man making gold watch hands in Lancashire almost certainly had no idea he was building a plant for Texas — and by his own account, he didn’t know which species he’d used anyway.
Planting & Care
Hardy amaryllis is an easy-to-grow bulb. It’s tolerant of acidic or alkaline soils and handles clay better than you’d expect, provided the wintertime drainage is adequate. That’s the one real condition. It isn’t the cold by itself that takes these bulbs out — it’s cold plus standing water.
Sun: Full sun or light shade. Both work.
Planting: Set the bulb with just the top of the neck out of the soil. If your bulb has a lot of greenery on it, you’ll be able to see where the bulb begins — barely cover the round part. Space them 6 to 8 inches apart to give them room to multiply, or 4 to 6 inches if you want the area to look natural more quickly.
After blooming: Do not cut the foliage down as long as it’s green. It’s feeding the bulb for next year’s flowers. When it’s completely yellow, cut it off.
Winter: Mulch over the top, especially in zones 7 and 8, just as a little extra protection.
Then leave them alone. Like any plant, better soil gives better growth — but once these bulbs have found a spot they’re happy in, this is very much a fend-for-itself kind of plant. The bulbs are smaller than a typical forcing amaryllis but they increase quickly, and left undisturbed for a number of years they’ll give you a colony.
The Flower at the Old House
This is the amaryllis I find in the field. Not in beds — at homesites, at old cemeteries, in the grass where a house used to be. Somebody’s grandmother planted it, and the family scattered, and the house fell in, and the bulb kept throwing red trumpets every April for nobody in particular.
And every one of those clumps traces back, in an unbroken line of division and gift, to five or six bulbs pulled out of a wrecked greenhouse in Prescot in 1802 — four or five of which Johnson immediately handed to other people. Then it only survived the twentieth century because ordinary southern gardeners kept doing the same thing he did — handing a piece to somebody else.
That’s the whole business, right there. Plant it, let it clump, and in a few years dig a piece off the side and give it to somebody. That is the only method by which this plant has ever traveled anywhere, and it has traveled a very long way.
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