Folks, From time to time we've had discussions about what drives the difference between a good bloom year and a bad bloom year for Amaryllis belladonna and its hybrids. Many of us in California and other Mediterranean-climate areas have some of those bulbs in the neighborhood, and because they are so big and colorful it's easy to notice when there is a good bloom. They seem to pop up all over the place. We have a lot of anecdotal guesses from things people have observed, but there's no consensus -- is blooming triggered by summer rains? Fires? Low summer temperatures? Etc... I realized the other day that we might be able to get some evidence from the archive of this mail list. Those of us who live in California usually write about the Amaryllis bloom season every year. So I went through the e-mail archives, checking every August, and looked for which years had the top blooms. One year really stood out: fall of 2006. Check the archives for yourself -- you'll see a lot of comments about the abundance of Amaryllis blooms that year. You'll also see a lot of comments that there was no significant rainfall that summer. "Warm, sunny, and dry" was a typical summary. Here's a typical post, from Mary Sue: http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbslist/old.php/… The comments about summer rain were interesting, because some very experienced growers say that a good summer drenching is the thing that triggers large blooms of Amaryllis. That may well work in their climates, but in much of California significant summer rainfall (even one good storm) is almost unheard-of. If that were the trigger, we'd get heavy Amaryllis blooms only about once every 20 or 30 years. So I looked up the weather statistics for that year. Sure enough, most of the populated areas of the state had no summer rainfall at all: http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/reports/… But something else also stood out. Winter of 2005-6 was a heavy rain year, with totals in many places about 150% of normal. The preceding winter, 2004-5, was also pretty good. The years before then (going back to 2002) and after (up to last winter) all had low to average rainfall. And they also had average Amaryllis blooms. This isn't much evidence to go on, but my preliminary guess is that Amaryllis blooms in California are triggered by high rainfall in the previous one (or two) winters. We'll have to wait for a couple of wet winters to test my theory. In the meantime, based on the rainfall last winter, I'd predict an average to low Amaryllis bloom season this year in California. Oh, and if you want better blooms from the Amaryllis in your yard, maybe the thing to do is give them extra water *in the winter*. I may try that with a few, just to see what happens. Mike San Jose, CA (zone 9, min temp 20F)