Back in 2018 I started a flat of amaryllis seeds I was able harvest when two of my bulbs, a sparkly white and a rich crimson, bloomed simultaneously and I was able to cross-pollinate.

It took four years but last spring I was blessed with several nice salmon colored flowers, the fruits of that patient growth. After starting the bulbs stashed from the prior summer around mid-February I was rewarded last year with more blooms than ever, taxing our limited window space but well worth a bit of pot crowding. After the blooms had faded I eased their transition to outside with a few weeks of shaded sun in May before I then planted the bulbs in the garden to fatten up for the next year. (One year they got introduced to too much sun too fast — sun scald, lost some leaves.) Well, fatten they did this year. Nights are getting cooler so I’ve dug them up and (reluctantly) trimmed the tops so they can spend a few months in the cool dark of our basement. I now have more than a dozen capable of putting on a show in the spring:

The largest are easily 5+ inches in diameter, and I couldn’t resist weighing the lot: I’m now blessed with 10 pounds of bulbs! In previous years the bulbs spent a fair amount of energy on offsets. While you can see a couple in this photo, there were only about half a dozen, and the lack no doubt contributed to larger bulbs.

Now I just need to remember to check on them periodically this winter and I could be rewarded with quite a show this spring. Going to have to give a few away though: definitely won’t be enough window space with this bunch!

I imagine that people who has spent even just a moderate amount of time studying fine art will be able to say “Oh, that’s an Edward Hopper” or “That’s a Picasso” even if they’ve never seen the particular work in question. The blocked colors and city scenes of a Hopper or the seemingly-casual strokes in a Picasso are often emulated but not quite the same.

This is largely true with scanographers as well. I can reasonably pick out from a lineup the works of at least three or four scanner photography artists, their subject matter and style leaving fingerprints all over their work (but not their carefully cleaned scanner glass!).

One such artist who’s style is readily recognized with her intricate designs packed full of flowers is Sandra R. Shulze, here with her “Floral Collage 18”:

(My wife would never let me get away with cutting so many flowers from our garden…but it’s a moot point, we don’t have that many!)

Sandra’s works evoke memories of fine floral needlepoint works from the 1800’s, though I imagine the fine ladies making such would be jealous of the brilliant colors captured by a scanner that couldn’t be accurately captured in their delicate threads. But we get to enjoy both — assuming you have a great-grandmother that bequeathed such an embroidery to you!