Belladonna lily

About the plant

In the dry autumn of the Cape, before the winter rains have brought a single leaf, a bulb of Amaryllis belladonna sends up a bare purple stem half a metre high and opens a crown of pink trumpets, scented and silky, in the bare ground: the naked lady of South African gardens. The leaves follow in winter and die away by summer. It was in Europe by the early eighteenth century and became one of the few Cape bulbs hardy enough for an English garden, flowering in September at the foot of a south wall where the bulbs can bake.

It is the only true amaryllis. Linnaeus named the genus in 1753 with this plant before him, but the big winter-flowering bulbs sold as amaryllis every Christmas are Hippeastrum, from South America, and for two hundred years botanists fought over which plant had the right to the name; the Cape plant won. Redouté painted it for the third volume of Les Liliacées in 1806, the bare stem with its crown of flowers and the bulb beside it. In Jersey it has long been grown in the fields, and the island's lily lent its name to Lillie Langtry, the Jersey Lily of the Victorian stage.