Naked Ladies invade Wine Country

It happens every August: As the dry heat of late summer paints the landscape a dreary brown, the Naked Ladies pop up and make heads turn.

The oddly bare, leafless two-foot stalks sporting pink lily-like flowers appear like space aliens, seemingly uninvited in old farmyards, along fencelines, in ruts and swales, dusty ditches and along the railroad tracks, shamelessly flashing their shocking pink heads and ungainly long gams for a couple of weeks before vanishing as mysteriously as they came.

"They arrive when nothing else is around," said Sonoma County Farm Advisor Paul Vossen with the UC Cooperative Extension. "It's why people really like them. Here is this dry landscape and then boom, out of nowhere, these beautiful flower stalks come sticking up."

Just as the neon swath of mustard in the vineyards signals spring, the ubiquitous pink Amaryllis belladonna loudly announces that summer is on the wane.

Unlike the shy little wildflowers that hide in the hillsides and meadows of the North Coast and are so fragile to disturbance, Naked Ladies are big and brassy and show off in the most unlikely and neglected of places.

"You can't kill them with a stick. Even if you transplant them at the wrong time, all that happens is they don't bloom," said Bob Hornback, a horticultural historian who works with Luther Burbank's Gold Ridge Farm in Sebastopol.

They don't need additional irrigation so even in a drought year like this, Naked Ladies bloom unbothered. They're highly poisonous, so deer, gophers and other critters won't touch them. They can frequently be spotted around old houses and farms, where they've probably dwelled for generations in defiant neglect.

It's that stubborn survivor quality however, that probably made them so attractive to early settlers.

"The early pioneers grew whatever they could. They didn't have a lot of space in their wagons for cuttings and seeds and yet you can bet they took whatever they could and something like that, as a dry bulb, would be easy to work with," Hornback said.

Unlike the fast spreading Scotch Broom, which settlers also brought to California to use in broom making, Naked Ladies are not invasive even though they are not native, and, in fact, hail from South Africa. But they do multiply quickly, "off-setting" additional bulbs, which is why you frequently see large eye-popping patches of them in neglected places, said Phil Van Soelen, owner of the California Flora nursery in Fulton.

Since they're easy to dig up and divide, old-timers likely passed them along to neighbors and acquaintances, which probably also explains why they seem to be everywhere.

"We forget now with iPods and Twitter that plants were popular and people gave stuff to each other. Farmsteads passed things around," said Fred King, a fourth generation Santa Rosan and third generation nursery owner.

Not surprisingly, Santa Rosa's famous plant breeder Luther Burbank was drawn to the gawky stalks with the big funnel-shaped flowers that are so easily adaptable to this climate. He crossed the Amaryllis with Crinum and came up with Amacrinum, a real feat at the time.

"People thought it was an impossible cross to make," said Hornback. "It's not only a cross between species, but between genera so it's a bi-generic cross. You don't have too many, period, in the whole botanic kingdom and he did it. He wasn't believed until the 1940s when another botanist pulled off the same cross."

Shepherd Bliss, a West County farmer who also teaches psychology at Sonoma State, said he loves the roguish independence of the Naked Ladies, some of which have insinuated themselves in among the rest of his flowers.

"They weren't here when I moved here 15 years ago," he mused. "I don't remember ever planting them myself. They just sort of showed up. They're like Jack London in the sense he's a Sonoma boy. They have that same wild, hardy, sometimes unkempt quality."

"But I suspect if I put in a formal garden," said Bliss, "they would rebel and go somewhere else."

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.