Tag: Amaryllis flower

Amaryllis or Hippeastrum Trio?

The Amaryllis trio are reaching for the stars, and “star” may be the operative word because I just found out the name of the flower may be in dispute.

It turns out that the actual name of the Amaryllis is probably Hippeastrum due to a change in the genus classification of this striking bloom. My word processor kept highlighting Hippeastrum, so I had to add it to the dictionary.

The usual name, which has been Amaryllis, sounds pretty and has a romantic story behind it based in Greek mythology. The short version is that a maiden named Amaryllis fell in love with a shepherd named Alteo. Alteo insisted that he would fall in love with a girl only if she brought him a new flower he’d never seen before. She went to the Oracle of Delphi who advised her to literally bleed for him—which she did by stabbing her heart every day and spilling her blood on the ground outside his house. On the 30th day, a gorgeous red flower bloomed out of the blood. After that she and Alteo were definitely an item. You can find this story on many gardening web sites.

On the other hand, the unromantic name Hippeastrum (it seems there are two ways to pronounce it, both of which sound like a sneeze) was given to the flower by someone named William Herbert. You can find the complete and erudite story about it on a WordPress blog called Professor Hedgehog’s Journal in the post, “Plant of the Month: February 2018.” The name means something like Knight’s Star.

I’m betting that stores are unlikely to change the name on the boxes, out of which the flowers burst impatiently on to the shelves.

Amaryllis Progress and Other Notes

I have a few messages to pass on today. This is the last day of November and the Amaryllis plants are doing so well Sena had to brace the tallest one using a Christmas tree stake and a couple of zip ties. It’s over two feet tall!

I’m not sure what to make of almost a dozen comments on my post “What Happened to Miracle Whip?” Apparently, a lot of people feel the same way I do about the change in taste of the spread. So, maybe it’s not just that my taste buds are old and worn out.

Congratulations to the Iowa Hawkeye Football team last night! They won against Nebraska by a field goal in the last 3 seconds of the game. I had to chuckle over the apparent difficulty the kicker had in answering a reporter’s question, which was basically “How did you do it?” There are just some things you can’t describe in words. There’s even a news story about how thinking doesn’t always have to be tied to language.

Along those lines, there might be no words for what I expect to think of tonight’s 1958 horror film on Svengoolie, “The Crawling Eye.” This movie was called “The Trollenberg Terror” in the United Kingdom version. I can tell you that “Trollenberg” was the name of a fictitious mountain in Switzerland.

I’m not a fan of Jack the Ripper lore, but I like Josh Gates expedition shows, mainly for the tongue in cheek humor. The other night I saw one of them about an author, Sarah Bax Horton, who wrote “One-Armed Jack”). She thought Hyam Hyams was the most likely candidate (of about 200 or so) to be Jack the Ripper, the grisly slasher of Whitechapel back in 1888. He’s a list of previously identified possible suspects. I found a blogger’s 2010 post about him on his site “Saucy Jacky” and it turns out Hyams is one of his top suspects. Hyams was confined to a lunatic asylum in 1890 and maybe it’s coincidental, but the murders of prostitutes stopped after that. I’m not going to speculate about the nature of Hyams’ psychiatric illness.

There’s another Psychiatric Times article about the clozapine REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies) program. I found a couple of articles on the web about the difficulties helping patients with treatment resistant schizophrenia which I think give a little more texture to the issue:

Farooq S, Choudry A, Cohen D, Naeem F, Ayub M. Barriers to using clozapine in treatment-resistant schizophrenia: systematic review. BJPsych Bull. 2019 Feb;43(1):8-16. doi: 10.1192/bjb.2018.67. Epub 2018 Sep 28. PMID: 30261942; PMCID: PMC6327301.

Haidary HA, Padhy RK. Clozapine. [Updated 2023 Nov 10]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK535399/

The paper on the barrier to using clozapine by Farooq et al is very interesting and the summary of the barriers begins in the section “Barriers to the use of clozapine in TRS (treatment resistant schizophrenia). I think it gives a much-needed perspective on the complexity involved in managing the disorder.

So what do you think about Miracle Whip?

Amaryllis and Zygocactus Repotting

Remember that gorgeous Christmas Amaryllis flower? After it leaned over so far, we had to retire it, so to speak. We didn’t throw it out, but Sena kept it and performed some kind of miracle.

Apparently, she resurrected it by giving it a little water. A couple of new leaves grew a few inches overnight.

She knows that gardeners tell you to bury the Amaryllis bulb outside after the flowers die. I guess in the following winter you dig it up, put it in a new pot and a new set of blossoms should grow. She wanted to transfer it to a different pot instead, one with holes that will let the excess water leak out.

She was very industrious. She also repotted the Zygocactus. That’s the holiday cactus, another houseplant she got for the Christmas holidays.

And the most important question: how are extraterrestrials involved in this urge to repot? ? By the way, I was not involved in the repotting project because I’m allergic to gardening. I did make a YouTube video of her working on it, though.

Amaryllis Star of Christmas

Well, I think all of the blossoms that are going to blow have blown on our Amaryllis, Star of Holland. There are 4 of them. They’re huge and glorious!

I didn’t know how it would turn out at first. It started off as just a little green stub. It soared to about 18 inches and then pushed out flowers in every direction.

It grew a lot quicker than I thought. I doubted it would bloom before Christmas. Now I’m not sure it’ll last until Christmas.

We do have a backup Poinsettia. And today, Sena just added a Zygocactus. I gather it’s a Christmas cactus.

Music creative commons attribution for video music:

Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100189

Artist: http://incompetech.com/

Announcements!

Today, I almost got a 29-hand playing cribbage with Sena. Almost is kind of like a fish story about the one that got away. I got dealt a Jack of hearts, and 3 fives, the heart, club, and diamond. If the Jack of heart had been in my hand and the 5 of hearts had been the starter card, and the other 5 in my hand had been the spade, I could have been a lucky guy, indeed. As it was, the hand was worth only 20 points. You can get better hands without all those fives, frankly. But it was still exciting. We both won a game and I finally won best two out of three. That’s rare.

There are definitely going to be 4 blossoms on the Amaryllis. They will make a great-looking bouquet. By the way, Sena has been to stores where the bulb kits are sold—some of the plants burst right through the boxes! That means you don’t have to do much to get them to grow—my kind of houseplant.

I’m Running on a Tight Schedule

Because I’m running on a tight schedule today, I’ll have to write this holiday flower-oriented post with lightning speed. There could be minor mistakes and you’ll just have to live with them.

First, we need to talk about the meaning of the usual Christmas holiday flowers. One of them is the Amaryllis, about which I’ve already given the important details in a previous post.

The other flower is the poinsettia, properly pronounced “flower.” Sena brought one home yesterday and it’s a beauty. The lore surrounding this holiday favorite is a bit convoluted. An angel ordered a peasant woman named Maria to gather roadside weeds. Maria was a little hard of hearing and thought the angel said “weed,” so she dug up a lot of marijuana growing wild in the ditches.

She took them to a little church, where the members of the congregation and the preacher lit them up with a little fire at the altar. The smoke got a little thick and everybody got a little confused and really hungry. They giggled a lot and their eyes burned a little, making everything look like it had a reddish color, including the “weeds.” Somebody knocked over the altar, spilling them all over the floor, which everybody swore they could feel through their shoes.

The poinsettia was known by the Aztecs who originally called it “Cuetlaxochitl,” which means “flower you can feel through your shoes, dude!”

There’s another version of the origin of the name of poinsettia. Some botanist in South Carolina named Poinsett (get that, har!) called it the “Mexican flame thrower,” probably because there was a legend in Mexico that extraterrestrials brought a plant with them that shot fire from its flowers, scorching all of the weed for miles.

Anyway, I think that’s how the history goes.