> >Just curious, do they bloom the year they are planted or do they >take a year to settle in before blooming? > If you are talking about flowering, in my experience, successful flowering of Amaryllis belladonna during the first year after planting depends on several factors, assuming the plants' other needs are met: First, the number of roots that are saved at the time of transplanting. The percentage of flowering the first year likely goes up with the number of roots that are saved at the time of transplanting. For example, I once planted out about 450 Hannibal hybrid Amaryllis bulbs that had no roots at all when first planted. Less than five flowered that same autumn. Only 17 flowered the following autumn. Nearly 200 flowered the following year after that. Second, bulb size. Like all bulbous plants, there is a minimum bulb size required for flowering. The minimum bulb size for A. belladonna to flower has been reported to be 26 cm (10 inches) but this seems very large and likely varies with growing conditions. Larger bulbs are much more likely to endure harsh transplant shock and root loss, flowering the first and second years. In the example above, I sorted and planted the bulbs by bulb size and the 17 that flowered were all from the largest 20% of the population. Large bulbs with intact roots that are carefully transplanted almost always flower the first and second summer/autumn. Less than 200 out of 450 bulbs flowered the third year in this example because many of the bulbs were not large enough to flower. Bulb size might influence spathe emergence time and could be responsible for some portion of the variability people observe within any given genetically identical population of plants. Of course, the overall timing of flowering of a given population is undoubtedly due to some aggregation of bulb temperatures during the 13 or more months prior to spathe emergence. Third, what species are we talking about? Amaryllis belladonna or the endless multitude of intergeneric Amaryllis hybrids that are available? They are not the same. The distribution curve of spathe emergence in autumn for my Hannibal Amaryllis population is completely different from that of my straight A. belladonna populations. Again, this should not be surprising to anyone who has observed populations of both. Just as they very greatly in flower color, Amaryllis hybrids vary in nearly every conceivable plant characteristic imaginable, including flowering time, minimum bulb size at first flower, etc. In my example above, why did so few bulbs flower both the first and second year with a big increase in the third year? A very small part of the increase can be attributed to the general increase in average bulb size of the entire population with time. The real answer is that when I planted these bulbs in the autumn of year one, both the spathe for that year (year one) and the spathe for the following autumn (year two) were already present in these bulbs. The harsh treatment these bulbs received before I planted them aborted both year one and year two spathes which is why I had to wait until year three for a lot more flowers. Yes, they can definitely flower the first year if transplanted with care. If not, you may have to wait two years for flowers. Nathan