Read This First: There Are Two White Crinum Lilies
We sell two different plants that a shopper could reasonably call “the white crinum lily,” and I want to sort that out before you spend a dime, because the difference between them will decide whether you’re happy.
This page is Crinum moorei ‘Album’. It is a species, it wants shade, and it is the parent.
The other one is Crinum × powellii ‘Album’. It is a hybrid, it wants sun, and it is the child — C. moorei is one of its two parents.
My store copy has been making this exact point for years, and it’s worth repeating in full: at first glance you might think we made a mistake and really meant to put all this information under the Crinum × powellii ‘Album’. We didn’t. They’re two plants. ‘Album’ just means “white” in Latin, and both of them are white, so both of them got called it.
The short version, if you’re deciding right now:
Got a shady spot? This one. C. moorei ‘Album’ is the only crinum I sell that actually prefers shade.
Got full southern sun? The other one. This plant will burn.
The Odd One Out
Everything else in this library is a sun plant. Eight hours minimum, full southern exposure, take the worst July you’ve got. That’s the crinum promise and it’s mostly true.
It is not true here, and that’s what makes this plant useful.
Crinum moorei is a forest lily. In its own country it grows in dappled shade in damp, marshy ground on the margins of coastal forest, and full sun doesn’t just stress it — it burns the leaves yellow and scorches the flowers. The people who grow it best, at the botanical gardens in its native province, keep it in semi-shade under a century-old avenue of plane trees.
So plant it where it can get early morning sun and a break from the afternoon. It doesn’t need full shade — just relief from the worst of the scorching. Or put it in dappled light all day, near the edge of a large tree, and let it be happy.
Which means this is the crinum for the problem corner. Everybody has one: the drab spot on the north side, the ground under the oak where the third hydrangea just died. This bulb wants that spot. It will transform and revitalize a dark area, and it’s the only member of this genus I can honestly recommend for the job.
A Soldier, a Dubliner, and a Man at Kew
The history here is unusually well documented for a crinum, and it’s a good story.
Crinum moorei is South African — the coastal forest of the eastern seaboard, from the northern Eastern Cape up through KwaZulu-Natal. It’s called the Natal lily there. The seed came out of Natal in the 1860s, collected by a British soldier named Webb.
Webb sent it to Dr. David Moore, the director of the Glasnevin Botanical Gardens in Dublin, who grew it. Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker — then the director of Kew — described the species from Moore’s plants and named it for the man who’d grown them. That’s the whole chain, and it comes from the South African National Biodiversity Institute, citing Verdoorn’s 1961 account in The Flowering Plants of Africa.
One point of housekeeping, because this gets muddled constantly: it’s David Moore, not Frederick Moore. Both ran Glasnevin — Frederick was David’s son and succeeded him. The naming was in the 1870s, when Frederick was still a teenager. It’s the father.
Now hold that next to the other page. A soldier picks up seed in Natal in the 1860s. A Dubliner grows it. Hooker names it. And within a couple of decades somebody in England crosses that same plant with C. bulbispermum and produces Crinum × powellii — the plant I sell down the road, that grows in a South Carolina plantation yard and in a bed at the Chelsea Physic Garden and in an abandoned sweet potato field in East Texas that is now my farm. This bulb is where half of that came from.
A Word About Its Wild Population
I’ll tell you something you won’t find in most catalogs. Crinum moorei is listed as Vulnerable on the Red List of South African Plants. The wild population is falling — down at least twenty percent over seventy years — mostly from bulbs being dug for the traditional medicine trade, and from an insect called the Amaryllis borer.
It’s the least common crinum species in the wild and it isn’t often seen there anymore.
I don’t raise that to be grim. I raise it because it’s an honest thing to know about a plant you’re putting in your yard, and because it sharpens what a garden is for. The nursery stock is not the problem — the digging is. Growing this plant is, in a small and indirect way, part of the answer rather than part of the trouble.
Uses in the Landscape
Centerpiece, in shade.
The foliage is wide, deep, glossy green and it’s a real asset. Be aware of its rhythm, though: it comes up in late winter or early spring, blooms around May, and then in the heat of summer it may die back until cooler weather returns. If the winter’s mild the foliage can hang on for months. That’s a shade forest plant’s calendar, not a Texas sun plant’s, and it’s worth planning around rather than worrying about.
Use the gap. When the crinum goes down, that ground is available. Lycoris radiata, Narcissus tazetta ‘Grand Primo’, and the other strong winter-foliage bulbs will fill it and let you pack more color into the same square foot. In summer, skirt the base with pink rain lilies, which bloom right alongside it.
Planting & Care
Depth: Neck of the bulb even with or just below the soil surface. Note this is slightly different from what I tell you elsewhere — this is a shade plant and it doesn’t need its neck in the sun.
Sun: Morning sun with afternoon relief, or dappled light all day. Not full southern sun.
Soil: Well drained. If you’re planting in summer heat, add a thin layer of mulch and water well for several weeks to get it moving.
Zones: 8 to 10.
Water: It’ll survive on neglect. But if you want those big blooms and it’s a dry spring and early summer, irrigate. It takes a lot of energy to make a flower that size, and the bulb can only spend what it has.
Blooms: Around May. Stalks over three feet, five to seven goblet-shaped blooms each, three to five inches across, rich deep pure white, fragrant. Excellent cut.
The Parent
I sell a lot of plants that are somebody’s cross. The pages fill themselves — a man, a wife, a date, a nursery.
This one is the raw material. Before there was a hybrid to name after Mr. Powell, there was a plant growing in wet shade on the Natal coast that nobody had crossed with anything, doing what it had done for however long it had been doing it. A soldier put some seed in an envelope. That’s the entire mechanism by which this thing entered the gardening world.
And then it went into the hybrids and mostly disappeared into them. It’s in powellii. It’s in ‘Walter Flory’, through the powellii side. It’s in half the pedigrees on this site, quietly, as the second name in a parenthesis.
Here it is undiluted. Pure white, in the shade, in May — the plant itself, not a plant made out of it. It’s fifteen dollars, and it is genuinely rarer in its own country than it is in ours.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com