Watching the last of the spring-flowering bulbs just start to slip away is always a moment slightly tinged with sadness for me. Yet, as with most things in gardening, their departure is also a reminder of the ideal time to get planting the next wave of bulbs, so you can keep the party going until the late autumn. And the best thing is that, in recent years, there have been a whole new group of varieties made available thanks to clever breeding, which have given us even more to play with: the amarines.
There’s a curious phenomenon in biology called “hybrid vigour”, where the offspring from the crossing of two different species are often larger, faster-growing and more resistant than either of their parents. This is particularly the case when the marriage is between two comparatively distantly related plants, belonging not just to different species, but totally different genera. So when I read that ingenious plant breeders had managed to cross the two autumn bulbs nerine and amaryllis to create a previously impossible intergeneric hybrid called “amarine” I knew we were likely on to a good thing – and after testing a few out I was simply blown away.
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