Read This First: There Are Two White Crinum Lilies
We sell two plants a shopper could reasonably call “the white crinum lily.” Sorting them out takes thirty seconds and will save you a season.
This page is Crinum × powellii ‘Album’. It is a hybrid, it wants sun, and it is the child.
The other is Crinum moorei ‘Album’. It is a species, it wants shade, and it is one of this plant’s two parents.
They both got called ‘Album’ because album is just Latin for white, and both of them are. That’s the whole reason for the confusion. There’s no conspiracy, only a shortage of adjectives.
Full southern sun? You want this page. This is the tough one.
Shady problem corner? You want the other page. This plant won’t thank you for shade.
My Favorite, and I’ll Defend It
The white crinum lily has to be one of my favorites.
It’s tough and it repeatedly throws prolific white blooms on three- to four-foot scapes, numerous flowers to a stalk, from spring through early summer. It starts on the heels of the color from the hardy amaryllis and the Byzantine gladiolus, which makes it a bridge — it picks up right where the spring bulbs quit. The foliage curves a little more than the other crinums and it’s a nice glossy green that’s attractive when the plant isn’t doing anything at all.
Crinum × powellii comes in two colors, pink and white. This is the white. The pink is ‘Roseum’, and it’s the same plant in every way that matters except the color.
It is one of the most cold hardy of all the crinums. That in no way means it can’t stand the heat — some of the toughest, oldest crinums we have are these white ones.
Where It Came From, and What I Can’t Tell You
Crinum × powellii is a garden hybrid, not a wild plant. It’s C. bulbispermum crossed with C. moorei — two South African species, the two hardiest in the genus. That much is not in dispute anywhere.
The rest is looser than the confident write-ups suggest, and I’d rather be straight about it.
The trade generally credits a man named Powell — usually given as C.B. Powell — with making the cross in nineteenth-century England, and credits the nurseryman E.G. Henderson with introducing it, often with a date around 1858. The botanist J.G. Baker published the name later, in the 1880s. You’ll also see the hybrid dated to the 1870s in perfectly respectable places. I have not been able to reconcile those accounts against a primary source, and the plant’s own botanical name carries the notation hort. — meaning “of the garden,” the tag botanists use when a plant turns up in cultivation and nobody can produce its birth certificate.
So here’s what I’ll stand behind: a Victorian named Powell crossed the Orange River lily with the Natal lily, sometime in the middle decades of the 1800s, and the result was better in a cold garden than either parent. Who exactly he was, and precisely when, I can’t hand you. Given that this is the single most widely grown hybrid crinum on earth, that’s a little remarkable, and it’s very much how this genus goes.
Where I’ve Found It
This is the crinum that keeps turning up, and the places tell you more than a hardiness rating ever will.
I was in South Carolina at a plantation where I saw one blooming in the middle of a very hot, very humid day — and I can only wonder how long that crinum had been planted there, and where it came from. Nobody was tending it. It was just working.
Some of our white crinum comes from the original home of a Texas Revolutionary War fighter, who had moved the crinum there from his first home in Georgia. Think about what that sentence contains. A man packed a bulb, carried it to Texas, planted it, fought a war, and died — and the bulb is still here, and I’m selling you its descendants.
And in 2009, leading a garden tour across England and the Jersey Islands, I spotted a nice established clump in the Chelsea Physic Garden, which was founded in 1673. Same plant. Different hemisphere of the gardening world entirely.
South Carolina, East Texas, central London. It is exciting to see a plant doing well in so many different areas of the world, and it is also the most persuasive hardiness argument I know how to make.
Herbs, Homer, and the Broken Shovels
The Chelsea Physic Garden clump nags at me for a reason I’ll admit is a stretch.
There’s a passage in the Odyssey — Book X, in Samuel Butler’s translation — where Hermes hands Odysseus a plant to protect him from Circe:
“As he spoke he pulled the herb out of the ground and shewed me what it was like. The root was black, while the flower was as white as milk; the gods call it Moly, and mortal men cannot uproot it, but the gods can do whatever they like.”
A white flower on a root that mortal men cannot uproot. I have a pile of broken shovels behind the barn from trying to liberate crinums whose roots have grown to the point that extraction is simply not going to happen, and every time I read that line I think of that pile.
Now, I’m a bulb farmer and not a classicist. Scholars have been arguing about what moly was for twenty-five centuries and the usual guess is snowdrop. I am not going to tell you Homer was describing a crinum, because I don’t know that and neither does anybody else.
What I’ll say is this: the Chelsea Physic Garden has grown medicinal plants since 1673, and there is a nice planting of Crinum powellii ‘Album’ sitting in it among the herbs. Bulbs can be considered herbs too. Make of that what you like. I made a whole trip out of it once and I’d do it again.
Uses in the Landscape
Sun, and let it get big.
The bloom window is the useful thing — spring through early summer, starting as the hardy amaryllis and Byzantine gladiolus fade. That’s a gap in most southern gardens and this closes it.
During winter, in colder areas, the foliage dies down completely. Don’t waste that ground. It opens an opportunity to plant winter-growing bulbs that will hide the bare stalks — Lycoris radiata, Narcissus tazetta ‘Grand Primo’, anything with strong winter foliage — and pack more color into the same space. In summer, skirt the base and the borders with pink rain lilies, which bloom at the same time and set the white off.
Planting & Care
Depth: Cover the bulb itself, leave the neck exposed.
Sun: Plenty of it. Good garden soil.
Zones: One of the most cold hardy crinums going. In zone 7, mulch well over the crown and consider covering it in a hard winter. You don’t need to worry about it dying otherwise — unless you spray something on it or live somewhere genuinely cold.
Water: Regularly through the hot dry months. They’ll bulk up and multiply quickly.
Moving: Crinums don’t like it, so it won’t bloom the first year. Give it a season to get adjusted and take the display next year.
Sizes: Large bulbs get to dividing and producing offsets sooner, and are likelier to give bigger and more blooms in year one. Small bulbs may take a couple of years. All sizes eventually produce the same beautiful blooms.
What Bill Welch Said
My former professor and mentor, Dr. Bill Welch, once said: “No crinum in the South has ever died.”
That’s a remembered remark rather than something I can point you to in a book, and it’s obviously not literally true. But it’s the truest false thing anybody has told me about this genus, and this is the plant that makes the case.
A Victorian nobody can quite identify crossed two African bulbs in an English garden a hundred and seventy-odd years ago. The thing he made is now standing in a Carolina plantation yard, in a physic garden in London, on the homesite of a man who fought Santa Anna, and in rows in an old sweet potato field in East Texas that I bought and then mostly walked away from. Nobody is watering any of it. Nobody has been for a long time.
Plant it where you want it, because you’re not moving it later. I have the shovels to prove it.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com