ZEPHYRANTHES

 

 

LT COL NOEL ELLIS

 

19/VI/2025

 

If I say “Zephyranthes”, what do you guys reckon? It isn’t the name of a Greek Goddess or a Gladiator, or even an extinct tribe. Yes, one can call them royal, regal, majestic, grand, dainty, graceful and elegant flowers adorning the Ellis’ Garden.

 

Let me not beat around the “Bulb”. They are a bulbous variety also called the “Rain Lily”. The bulb is small and fragile but it is like “plant it and forget it”. As the first pre-monsoon showers have arrived, the bulbs have sprung to life, having stayed in dormancy from the fall of the previous year.

 

This plant has a unique feature. The first sign it hints at that it has not perished is its bud. There are no leaves, just a bud which pops up immediately after the first rain. These bulbs have nerves which can sense the signals that it is not the gardener sprinkling water but a rain shower from the skies. How? Your guess is as good as mine.

 

Last season, we stowed the bulbs with the soil. The leaves died because of their life cycle but the bulbs were left to rest and recoup inside their respective pots.

 

There was a kleptomaniac who stole a few pots, thinking they were empty. The person kept the pots and threw the “babies with the bathwater’. She emptied the pots along with the bulbs in the farthest dustbin. I presented her with all that she had stolen with a request to ‘ask’, instead of steal.

 

Be that as it may. My story of rain lilies goes back to my childhood. Those days there were just the pink ones which my father had collected from various places and friends. Forty years hence, when I had a garden, it was time to replant them. We got some from nurseries & some bulbs we bought online.

 

They seemed to love our flower beds when we transplanted the baby bulbs in beds. Within two years those bulbs multiplied in geometric progression and flowered profusely like a carpet of water lilies. Then, I had four different colours. Two types of pink, yellow and white.

 

The quest for more and a quest to add variety continued. One day while surfing the net, we found a nursery ‘claiming’ to sell Zephyranthes bulbs in ‘twenty’ different colours. It was quite unbelievable. With my past experience, chances were that what the nursery people claim and what they send is at variance. It was worth a try.

 

I took a chance as this seller had sent me healthy water lily plants and would not take a chance to lose a customer. To begin with, four additional colours other than the ones I already had were ordered just in time before their flowering season, which has just begun. The name suggests and rains are here.

 

If you look at the bulbs closely, they are small and quite frail. Bulbs do not resemble small round onions used in 'sambar' but like fresh spring onions without the green leaves. Thin and elongated. A newbie may doubt that they may not look authentic. That is not the case. We added four new rain lily colours in our collection. They have come to bloom today.

 

Every year many pots of seasonal plants get empty. For a garden enthusiast, to see any pot sans a plant is an eyesore. To fill them up, another nursery selling more varieties of bulbs was shortlisted.

 

Many of them cost a fortune. They came last week and were planted the very next day. Today, three of them have bloomed. They are shades of pink, with veins along the petals. One is flame coloured. The flower size varies due to hybridization. Red may bloom tomorrow.

 

The rain yesterday hit the petals hard and one can see scars on them. Lily flowers can stay from a day to about a week. One has to be patient enough to wait for them to multiply and will fill the pot with numerous baby bulbs.

 

Once the season is over, the nodes where the flowers grew turn into seed pods. We spread them but have yet to see them sprout. Hopefully, they will this season.

 

These are very easy to grow flowers from bulbs. If you are a novice or a lazy gardener or the one who forgets to water or doesn’t like to get his hands dirty in mud, they are ideal. Even if these bulbs are left while you proceed on a vacation, they don’t die. Their ‘knitting needle’ like leaves provide greenery most of the year. A must try, for every beginner.

 

The rain lily season has started and we have twenty new bulbs waiting to show their colours. What colours will they reveal? I wonder!!!!!

 

JAI HIND

©® NOEL ELLIS