Northern California, cool and windy throughout the year, seems no place for Naked Ladies. In late summer, after months without rain, the countryside dons a muted wardrobe of sun-bleached fields and tawny hills. Then, flamboyant pink flowers burst into bloom like brazen hussies dressed for the wrong party.
They don’t belong here. Amaryllis belladonna (which translates as “sparkling beautiful lady”) is an immigrant, native to South Africa, which has a similar climate with arid summers and wet winters. Unlike the spring wildflowers that carpet fields in harlequin shades, Pink Ladies—a more demure nickname–bide their time to make a spectacular entrance when the earth seems parched for color.
Theirs is a topsy-turvy calendar. Early in the year, they push out strap-shaped leaves that photosynthesize to replenish large underground bulbs. As summer fades, tall leafless stalks shoot upward, crowned with as many as a dozen lush, trumpet-shaped flowers. Outrageously pink, the leggy beauties parade on gusty bluffs, along roadsides, around abandoned farmhouses.
Although they may look frivolous, Naked Ladies are exquisitely engineered to survive and reproduce. In full bloom, the graceful petals, lined with delicate stripes, open to reveal impish yellow stamens. Drawn by the sweet scent, pollinators, including bees and moths, venture deep within to savor their nectar. Other animals have learned to stay away. Every part of this plant is toxic, especially its bulbs, which may endure for decades.
The famed horticulturist Luther Burbank, a Sonoma County resident, was smitten. He set out to clothe the nakedness of Amaryllis belladonna by crossing them with the Crinum lily. The result: Amarcrinum, a more modest lady that keeps her leaves while in bloom. But in the wild, Naked Ladies prefer the caress of the breeze on their bare stalks.
Over the years, I came to think of them as summer’s last hurrah: a blaze of glorious color before autumn’s somber palette. But they took on new meaning in an unexpected place: among the graves of Calvary Cemetery in Bodega, where generations of Catholic families have laid their loved ones to rest.
For a quarter-century, Art Hansen, a retired parishioner of St. Teresa of Avila in Bodega, tended and beautified the cemetery. When the daffodils he’d planted didn’t survive, he decided to try his wife Sheila’s favorite: Pink Ladies.
In 2023, Art found a donor who wanted thousands of the bulbs removed from her property. Five mornings a week for seven weeks, he left home at 6:30 a.m. and spent a few hours digging them up with a pitchfork, packing them into banana boxes and hauling them—about 8,000 in all—to the cemetery.
Sheila, who died that June after nearly 68 years of marriage, never saw the flowers she loved dance amid the tombstones. They now serve as a living memorial, not only to her, but to all the souls buried on the serene hillside.
In August, with the Pink Ladies in splendid profusion, I passed the cemetery during a burial. At the sight of mourners in black amid the neon blooms, I paused to reflect on the striking juxtaposition of grief and exuberance, loss garlanded by vibrant flowers.
I recalled something Art once said, “Pink Ladies don’t last too long, but when they appear, it’s a beautiful thing to see.”
A kiss goodbye—to a season and to lives that once sparkled in the sunshine.
