Amaryllis belladonna – the March or Easter Lily

This beautiful sweet smelling flower is to be seen all over Cape Town at the moment. It flowers around Easter and so has become known as the Easter Lily or March Lily. I like its other name – Naked Ladies! It is a beautiful, soft, feminine plant that flowers at a tough time of the year. I suspect that it is one of the plants that can help one to connect or reconnect to the feminine. Certainly, the homeopathic proving brought out many ‘female symptoms’. And in keeping with the Easter theme, this geophyte seems to resurrect itself from ‘death’ with a beautiful flowering. Only later are the leaves produce, before they themselves die, leaving the only dead remnants of the above-ground plant.  Like many Amaryllids (Daffodil Family) these plants can mediate between the above and below – they are the midwives of death and (re)birth, connectors of the dark-below with the light-above.