Dear Robert-Emmanuel, If you can send me a picture of the flowers on your bulb, I'd be happy to offer my own best guess as to its identity. With more than one flower per scape, it is definitely not Sprekelia. Your written description sounds rather like the Hippeastrum cybister hybrids that have recently come on the bulb market. However, my visual recognition is much better than my translation of words into images in my head, so a picture would be a big help. I'm a retired biochemist. As a hobby and retirement business, I tend to specialize in the Amaryllidaceae, but I'm not as well informed about newer hybrids as I am about species. Best regards, Jim Shields in central Indiana, USA At 10:49 AM 2/26/2009 +0100, you wrote: >My name is Robert-Emmanuel Brasseur (Robert). I live as a retired civil >servant in Leuven, near Brussels in Belgium. I spent much of my >professional life in the tropics of Africa and Asia within de framework of >rural development projects. For hobbies I combine gardening, field botanny >and ornithology with music. >........ >The picture very much correspond with that of my plant. On other sites I >found however other pictures of so-called Hippeastrum papilio that present >Hippeastrum features such as broad petals. Did the few butterfly bulbs >have such rich genetic potential on their own or is it this huge variation >in features the result of (un)controled hybridization? If so the question >is: which were the shape and colour pattern of the original Hippeastrum >papilio found in Brasil's southern Atlantic Forest. > >Thanks in advance for your comments, > >Robert-E. Brasseur ************************************************* Jim Shields USDA Zone 5 Shields Gardens, Ltd. P.O. Box 92 WWW: http://www.shieldsgardens.com/ Westfield, Indiana 46074, USA Tel. ++1-317-867-3344 or toll-free 1-866-449-3344 in USA