Amaryllis as house plants: plant your bulbs now for winter color

Who doesn’t love the trumpet blooms of Amaryllis during the dreary winter months? Now available in an amazing range of sizes and colors, from huge flowers 8″ or more across to smaller delicate clusters of blooms, there is an Amaryllis to suit every taste. Amaryllis make great house plants if you can provide them with bright direct sun. If you don’t have a sunny windowsill, but have a sunny balcony or yard, you can still grow them as house plants over the winter and spring months (which is when they flower). The rest of the year they can be grown outdoors.

With a little care, Amaryllis will bloom every year from from winter through spring. In time with good care, you will be rewarded with up to three flower stalks in succession, each with 4 or more blooms!

I recently bought a few more Amaryllis bulbs to add to my collection in a moment of weakness (see photo below). I got two cybister Amaryllis bulbs, which tend to have spidery blooms (‘Chico’ and ‘Bogota’) and a more exotic look than the traditional Amaryllis. I also bought ‘Lemon Lime’, a shorter-statured beauty with flowers in lime-yellow to soft green. As you can see, the cybister bulbs(and thus plants) tend to be smaller than the regular-sized Amaryllis, and are better suited to windowsills or apartment culture. I’ll post photos when the bulbs start to bloom!

Learn how to pot up and care for you Amaryllis bulbs.