Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🐅 🐅 🐅 tigers for ultimate December, New Year’s Eve, and the winter flowers are well advanced at my house. (No photos, alas; I no longer have any way to take photos or anyone to take them for me.)

Outdoors. I have already written about the rogue yellow cymbidium that got confused about the seasons and sent up a flower stalk around Halloween and was blooming splendidly in early December, a full month early. (See my 12/13 posting “The rogue orchid”.) Now one of its clones is opening up, to greet the new year, as is customary. (This yellow cultivar is always the first of my many cymbidiums to bloom; there are maybe a dozen flower stalks up — they’re often hard to see until the get quite tall — but their buds won’t open for a month or two. And then there will be orchids in many colors, until the summer heat arrives.)

Indoors. Astonishingly, one of the waxed amaryllises — the all-white cultivar Grateful Heart — that Kathryn Burlingham sent me early in December (see my 12/3 posting “Waxed amaryllis”) didn’t behave according to predictions and, rather than glacially growing its leaves until, after a month or so, a flower stalk would appear, to bring flowers in time for Easter, Grateful Heart immediately sent up a flower stalk which grew visibly by the day (plant growth can sometimes be a scary thing) and opened its first bloom (of four) on the 29th, the second today. What an extraordinary gift of beauty in a dark cold time, as I face with dread what 2024 will offer.

This entry was posted on December 31, 2023 at 10:41 am and is filed under Holidays, Language and plants, My life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.