The Bulb I Give Away
When I’m trying to decide what bulb to send to friends and family, this is the first one I think of.
Part of that is the flower. Part of it is what happens afterward — the texted photos that come in at random, years later, from people I hadn’t heard from, because their Mrs. James Hendry is blooming and they thought of me. No other bulb I sell generates that.
I’ve tried calling her MJH. I’ve tried just Hendry, with a hard d. It never sticks. I keep saying the whole name out loud in casual conversation like I’m announcing her at a party, and I’ve made my peace with it. The flower deserves the full title.
Who Was Mrs. James Hendry?
I don’t know. I’ll say that plainly, because I’ve spent real time on it and come up empty.
Here’s what we do know, and it comes from Scott Ogden’s Garden Bulbs for the South: “Henry Nehrling [a Florida nurseryman] introduced another handsome blush-colored hybrid around 1915. This exquisite flower, ‘Mrs. James Hendry’, ranks among the most beautiful and rewarding Southern perennials.”
The Pacific Bulb Society agrees on the maker and hedges everything else the same way I’d hedge it: hybridized by Henry Nehrling circa the early 1900s, ancestry unknown, suspected to be C. erubescens × C. × powellii. Suspected. Not established.
So we have a nurseryman, a rough decade, a guess at the parents, and a woman’s married name. Nehrling was a serious plantsman working in Florida in the same years Louis Bosanquet was making ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ a couple of counties away, and between them those two men did more for the southern summer garden than most botanical institutions have managed.
But the lady herself is a blank. She was somebody’s wife, in Florida, a hundred and ten years ago, and a man who knew what a good flower was decided this was the one to put her name on. Whoever she was, she must have been remarkable. That’s not a fact and I’m not presenting it as one. It’s just the only reasonable conclusion available, and I’d rather leave the gap honest than fill it with something I made up.
Fragrance
She fills my personal garden for several reasons and this is one of them.
‘Mrs. James Hendry’ opens up wide — flat open, not a bell — and releases the scent at the same time. The stems are begging to be cut and brought in out of the heat, even though ours keep blooming outside at 100 degrees without complaint.
Do this: cut one flower stalk from a large bulb and put it in your bedroom overnight. A light spicy fragrance will fill the room and grace your dreams. I’m not being poetic. Try it in June and then tell me I oversold it.
Bloom Time — the Real Advantage
This is where she separates from the field, and it isn’t close.
Starting in late May she blooms heavily through early summer, then intermittently the rest of the season. Multiple blush flowers on several stalks that shoot up one after another — not all at once, which is the difference between a week of show and a season of it. We often see four to six flushes from spring until fall, especially from Central Texas down to the coast. They are almost unmatched in their bloom habit by any other crinum.
In the fall, when temperatures drop, mature clumps keep going. If we get no freeze or hard frost, we generally have blooms for Thanksgiving.
If you’re near the Gulf or the Atlantic — Houston, Mobile, New Orleans, Savannah, Charleston — or in Southern California or Arizona, she’ll bloom nearly all year in the absence of a hard freeze.
Honest note for my own neighborhood: up here in Tyler, and in Dallas, she’s a little slower to leaf out after a cold winter. We still get a great show once it warms up, but you’ll wait for it.
Planting & Care
Depth: Neck of the bulb right at or barely above soil level. Well-drained soil.
Sun: 8+ hours a day. Full summer sun is fine; a little late-afternoon shade is a bonus.
Height: Four to five feet in bloom. Plant her behind low trimmed hedges or behind benches — she’ll show herself just fine over the top while the base stays hidden.
Companions: Lantana, phlox, and salvias around the outer base.
Dormancy: When the freeze or hard frost comes in late fall, let the foliage die down naturally. It turns brown fast and drapes over the clump like a blanket, protecting it through the cold. You can remove it — but if you do, and you’re in zone 8 or colder, mulch the clump.
A trick worth doing: ring the outside of the clump with Narcissus ‘Grand Primo’ or campernelles. They bloom in winter and early spring while the crinum is flat asleep, and hand off to her in May. Same square footage, twice the year.
Water: Regularly through the hot dry months. They’ll bulk up and multiply quickly.
Why She Costs What She Costs
Sixty dollars for a bulb is a real number and you’re entitled to an explanation.
She’s slower than the fifteen-dollar crinums. That’s the whole answer. A crinum’s price is a straight function of how fast it makes babies, and this one takes her time. The bulbs we sell are the product of years, not months, and the reason I keep digging her anyway is that I’ve never found anything that blooms like her.
And once she’s in, she’s in. Crinums don’t like to be moved, so she won’t bloom for you the first year — give her time to settle and enjoy the display next year. Then enjoy it for the next forty. Somewhere in Florida there is presumably a spot where the first one grew for a woman whose first name nobody wrote down, and her flower is still blooming in yards from Savannah to San Antonio a century later. Plant it where it can stay, and give a piece to somebody who’ll text you a picture.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com