In the garden now: Bella Donna lilies
Amaryllis belladonna. The naked-lady lily. My childhood garden in San Francisco was terraced, the different levels descending from general order to complete wildness. As a very young person I needed an adult’s help to navigate the gate leading to the lowest, steepest, “secret garden.” A little older and finally able to explore alone, I would pick my way down the vertiginous stairs, jumping the last step which ended well above the ground. I remember an Autumn day, the golden leaves of our Mirabelle plum falling in the breeze. I slid slightly on my dismount and as I regained my footing, came face to face with the open mouth of an amaryllis belladonna. I stood stunned. Where had these creatures come from? I had no memory of the nondescript foliage from a few months ago. Their voluptuousness and clear ornamental value seemed slightly out of place among the forgotten orchard and runaway bamboo of this deepest garden. The juxtaposition made them that much more thrilling. Quietly they had grown, untended and unbothered, and likely unseen, for years.
They continue to be a charming, even disarming, August tradition for me, and are ubiquitous throughout our area. Seeded or planted in seemingly inhospitable conditions like dry fields and balding hillsides, they naturalize readily and colonize in great clumps and are a wonderful addition to dry or low-water gardens. The sobriquet “naked lady” comes from the way the flower presents in late summer: a strong, tapered, purple stalk rising from the bare earth — naked — to present a huge, pink, multi-headed bloom. The bulb grows green strap-like leaves in the spring which allows for photosynthesis to feed the bulb. Then the foliage dies back before the flower emerges later in the year. The flowers themselves start bright pink and then fade to a papery parchment. Their scent is sweet and stronger at night.
Native to Cape Province in South Africa, they have naturalized in rocky, dry places like Corsica and Southern California but can also handle the humid U.S. Delta. Their semi-wild growth habit reveals much about what they like and also what they can put up with.
A. belladonna want hot, sunny spots and do well on a slope where they won’t sit in water. Plant them with their crown — the pointy top of the bulb — exposed. You’ll see established clumps growing like this, mounding up out of the ground to bake in the sun. Unlike many other bulbs, they also seem to prefer crowding, and flower prolifically when they sit cheek-by-jowl. They don’t seem to be too picky about soil conditions — they grow readily on our heavy clay and go completely without water from spring onward. The tougher the better, it would seem: in these hot, lean spots, the bulbs will put more energy into making flowers rather than foliage.
If you need to move them, do so immediately after flowering, when they are dormant and before they’ve developed foliage. A favorite of pollinators, ours regularly have bees buzzing happily deep in the trumpet-shaped bloom.
