Not All Bulbs Are Dug
Most of what I sell, I went and got. That’s the job and it’s most of the reason anybody knows my name.
Our first pink crinums were a gift from a friend.
Years ago we planted rows of this flower in an abandoned sweet potato field that is now our farm. Then we walked away. Four years later the bulbs had turned into large clumps of five or more, sending up two and three bloom stalks every year. They were competing with the weeds, the hogs, and the grasshoppers, using nothing but the rain that fell on them.
That’s the whole trial. Four years, no water, no fence, no attention, hogs. And light pink trumpets on four- and five-foot stalks at the end of it.
The Pink Half of Powell
Crinum × powellii comes in two colors, pink and white. This is the pink one. The white is ‘Album’ — same hybrid, same constitution, same everything except color.
The plant behind both is a nineteenth-century English garden cross: Crinum bulbispermum, the Orange River lily, put together with Crinum moorei, the Natal lily. Two South African species, the two hardiest in the genus, crossed by a Victorian named Powell and put into the trade by the nurseryman E.G. Henderson. The parentage is solid. The date is not — you’ll see 1858 and you’ll see the 1870s, and the botanical name carries the tag hort., which is what botanists write when a plant shows up in gardens and nobody kept the paperwork. I’ve put what I know and what I don’t on the ‘Album’ page rather than say it twice.
It is one of the most cold hardy of all the crinums. That doesn’t mean it can’t stand the heat. Some of the toughest and oldest crinums we have are Crinum powellii.
A Giant Blooming Near Columbus, Texas
A few years back I made a trip that turned into something. Six days and twelve hours, four states — Mississippi and Alabama in there — through pine trees, the Gulf coast, and up into the foothills of the Texas hill country, if you’ll allow that just south of Boerne counts as foothills.
Toward the end of it I pulled into Columbus, Texas, where Bob and Mary Anne Pickens gave me a place on their porch, a glass of iced tea, and time to catch up. The Pickens are sixth-generation German Texans. Gardening runs in Mary Anne’s blood — her grandfather ran a nursery in the region, and she’s a past president of the Southern Garden History Society. She keeps a beautiful naturalized stand of heirloom oxblood lilies and she let me take several hundred of them home to the farm, which tells you the kind of people they are.
And they started telling me about a giant crinum blooming nearby. It turned out to be a Crinum powellii ‘Roseum’ — this plant, the one on this page.
Mary Anne told me she hoped to dig it up one day and make a home for it.
I sat there and thought about the pile of broken shovels I have amassed trying to liberate crinums whose roots have grown and strengthened to the point that extraction becomes impossible. We were like gray-haired men trading big fish stories, except the fish was a bulb, and the bulb always wins.
Mortal Men Cannot Uproot It
There’s a passage in Homer’s Odyssey — Book X, in Samuel Butler’s translation — that I go back to more than a bulb farmer probably should. Hermes gives 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 plant whose roots ran so large and so deep that even the gods had to make a point of it. Apparently the gods can still do whatever they want. The rest of us have shovels, and I can tell you exactly how well those work.
I’m not going to tell you moly was a crinum. Scholars have been at that question for twenty-five centuries and the usual guess is snowdrop; I grow bulbs for a living and that’s a different qualification. But when a woman in Columbus, Texas tells me she’s thinking about digging up an established crinum, and I’ve got a graveyard of shovel handles behind my barn, I know which side of that I’d bet on.
Rest assured: if you plant one of these lovely southern bulbs, it will gladly establish itself, even in poor soil. That’s a promise and also a warning. Establishing itself is exactly what it does, and it does not consult you about the terms.
Uses in the Landscape
Sun, and a spot you’ve thought about.
The robust foliage curves a little more than the other crinums and holds a nice glossy green that’s attractive even when the plant isn’t blooming — which is more than half the year, so it counts. Established bulbs put up four- to five-foot stalks with multiple two-inch lily-shaped trumpets on each.
In winter, in colder areas, the foliage dies down completely. The bulb is perfectly healthy and just waiting for warm weather. Use that window: Lycoris radiata, Narcissus tazetta ‘Grand Primo’, and other strong winter-foliage bulbs will cover the bare ground and get you more color out of the same square foot.
Planting & Care
Depth: Cover the bulb, leave the neck exposed.
Sun: Plenty. Good garden soil.
Zones: Among the most cold hardy crinums. In zone 7, mulch well over them and consider covering in a hard winter if you want them back.
Water: Regularly through the hot dry months. They bulk up and multiply quickly. Mine got rainfall only and did fine, but “fine” and “spectacular” are different words.
Moving: Don’t. See above, at length.
Sizes: Large bulbs divide sooner and bloom bigger in year one. Small bulbs may take a couple of years. All sizes eventually give the same flower.
The Gift
I want to come back to where this started, because I think it’s the point.
I have built a business out of going and finding things. Roadsides, cemeteries, homesites where the house has fallen in. It’s honest work and I’m proud of it.
But the pink crinum came to me because a friend handed it to me. The oxbloods came off Mary Anne Pickens’s place because she offered. That’s the older economy and it’s still running underneath everything I do — a plant moves because somebody decided to give it away, and then a hundred years later somebody like me writes a page about it and acts like there was a system.
There wasn’t a system. There was a Victorian with two African bulbs, and a nurseryman, and eventually a friend of mine with a shovel and a reason to be generous. Then an abandoned sweet potato field, four years of neglect, and a stand of pink flowers that didn’t need me at all.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com