Amaryllis on trial

common Christmas gift, by starting this month you could have yours in flower during the winter holidays. But don’t go for the standard reds and whites as, following recent exciting breeding work, there’s now a huge range of colours and flower types on offer, from the subtle to the sheer outrageous. Having once been a tad sniffy about amaryllis (partly due to towers of boxes in shops), the new range of varieties made me want to experiment. I trialled more than 60 varieties at West Dean, and have now whittled this down to a list of the best and most