Hathor

Jim Lykos jimlykos@optusnet.com.au
Wed, 17 Aug 2005 04:34:35 PDT
Hi Diana and Paul  

I neglected to look at the image of Diana's bulb in the mystery section of Wiki until after I had sent my written response yesterday. While you have the good fortune of having an attractive white Amaryllis from Les Hannibals breeding, it is nothing like xAmarygia Hathor.

xAmarygia Hathor has a white flowers with a deep apricot centre, and attractively twisted tepals with ruffled (wavy) tepal edges. 
It resembles more a  Cattleya orchid than your typical Amaryllis flower. Nevertheless your white Amaryllis does show signs of being of hybrid origin. The radial pattern of the flowers and the number of flowers suggest that at while it hasnt retained many Brunsvigia genes it is still different from a pure Amaryllis belladonna alba. Apart from backcrosses Les Hannibal also crossed  xAmarygia 'alba's'  with Amaryllis belladonna alba forms - so there is a range of albas with more or less xAmarygia and Amaryllis influence. 

I have sent you privately a picture of xAmarygia multiflora 'Harbord' (Amaryllis multiflora 'Harbord) released by the Holloway Bros Nursery in 1927 - to Wiki.  Harbord was released before 'Hathor' (around 1930) and it resembles it closely - the main difference being that Harbord has a larger flower with fewer twists to the petals than Hathor.

Pauls Amaryllis from the Van Tubergens nursery is almost certainly not Hathor. This nursery created many hybrids of Amaryllis with Brunsvigia josephinea  and deveoped a range of named cultivars over a few decades of breeding - the best of which I  known as 'Enchantment'.  However, while they did gather some breeding plants from around the world I have not seen pictures of any distinctive white  Amaryllis hybrids produced by them that look remotely like Hathor.

Cheers
Jim Lykos
Blue Mountains


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