SOMETHING ABOUT HIPPEASTRUMS. 



89 



ripened and burst, showing the interior full of the usual black seeds. I 

 took out the seeds and spread them on a sheet of paper, and lo and 

 behold, not one of them had any embryo in it ! They were all chaff. 

 Now what was the fun of this trick on the part of the Hippeastrum and 

 Sprekelia ? — the ovary, on the application of the pollen, swelling, and 

 making believe that it is going to be full of seed, and when it bursts it is 

 full of nothing but chaff. Such make-believes must often occur in nature, 

 when insects visit one flower after another of different genera, and dust 

 the stigmas with different pollens ; but there is nobody to record such 

 interesting tricks. 



Of course none of these chaffy seeds germinated. 



Then, in 1904, I repeated the attempt to cross these two Amaryllids. 

 Many failed outright ; two resulted in the same phenomenon of ripening 

 their pods and containing nothing but chaff; another had apparently 

 five good seeds among its chaff, none of which germinated ; yet another 

 seemed to have three good seeds, which failed to germinate. 



Finally a Hippeastrum bore two pods which had also been fertilised 

 with the Sprekelia pollen ; and I am glad to say that this curious make- 

 believe ceased in this case. One of the pods had forty-five apparently good 

 seeds, of which twenty-one germinated ; the other had what appeared to 

 be twenty good seeds, of which five have germinated. 



They are all in their young first blade, and may not survive their 

 infancy, for this cross is a weak one ; but perseverance year after year has 

 at last been crowned with some seeds that have germinated. 



If I were asked " What do you expect to get out of these crosses ? " I 

 would say " Nothing but Hippeastrums ! " For my experience has been that, 

 even when Hippeastrum is crossed with Hippeastrum, if the thing takes, 

 the prepotency of the mother-factor wipes out the pollen-factor, and in 

 bigeneric crosses, when they succeed, the prepotency of the mother-factor 

 is likely to be even greater. All the individuals of these bigeneric crosses 

 have the foliage of the Hippeastrum ; and so, I think, will be their flowers. 



In " Indian Planting and Gardening " a writer, signing himself " G. C. 

 0.," from Mussoorie on September 20, 1898, declared that he succeeded in 

 crossing the Hippeastrum with the pollen of the Sprekelia. He says, 

 " I have secured the intense colour of the Sprekelia in the form of the 

 Hippeastrum. I may mention that not one plant in the whole collection 

 took the form of the Sprekelia." 



Yet, when I was in Florence many years ago, I visited the Giardino 

 Santarelli, famous for its Camellia bushes. The gardener also grew the 

 Amaryllis, or Hippeastrum, as it is now called. The owner showed me a 

 coloured drawing of one of his Amaryllises. It had exactly the form of 

 the Sprekelia, with broad petals of a white colour, slashed and veined 

 crimson. He kindly gave me a copy of that coloured drawing, which I 

 posted to the " Garden," but I do not think that it was ever reproduced in 

 that journal. Perhaps that drawing may still be among the archives of 

 the " Garden," if it ever reached its editor. 



The plant itself was not then in flower. The drawing, however. * - 

 very beautiful and unique. 



The Hippeastrum very often has on its face the stamp of having been 

 evolved from a Sprekelia-like ancestry. 



