A Crinum Named for Mr. Texas Wildflower
Crinum ‘Carroll Abbott’ is named after one genuinely interesting man, and for once in this genus the naming is the best-documented part of the story.
Think of a milk and wine crinum, but with darker wine patterns, fuller blooms, and flowers that open more widely. It’s a selection well worth having. We only wish we had more.
Who Carroll Abbott Was
Carroll Abbott (1926–1984) founded the Native Plant Society of Texas, and people called him Mr. Texas Wildflower without irony.
He grew up in Houston, and he was at it from the beginning — as a boy he made money collecting seeds and bulbs of wildflowers and selling them, and digging plants from along the railroad tracks and the highway rights-of-way. If that sounds like somebody you know, it’s because that is exactly the education I got, forty years later, doing exactly the same thing on the same roadsides. He was a bulb hunter before I was born.
He came to Kerrville in 1955 to work on the Times. Then he got good at politics and public relations and made real money at it. And then in 1970, at the height of that success, he came back to Kerrville and announced he had quit — to go sell native plants and seeds under the name Green Horizons and spend the rest of his life on the disappearing wildflowers of Texas.
He got it done, too. In the late 1970s he worked with university faculty on the idea of a native plant society, and the Native Plant Society of Texas was established on Wildflower Day in April 1981. That same year he lobbied to set the fourth Saturday in April as Texas Wildflower Day. He died of cancer in July 1984 — three years after founding the thing he’d given up a career for. The Kerrville chapter keeps a memorial garden for him at the Riverside Nature Center.
A man walks away from the money to go dig plants on the side of the road in Texas, gets fifteen years, and leaves behind an institution that outlived him by forty. Then somebody puts his name on a flower. I’m not sure what else you’d want out of a life.
Where the Flower Came From
Here I have to be careful, and I have to correct something.
Plant Delights Nursery — whose crinum records are as good as anybody’s — describes ‘Carroll Abbott’ as an introduction from the East Texas crinum breeder Marcelle Sheppard, derived from a cross of Crinum bulbispermum and C. scabrum. That makes it Crinum × herbertii by parentage, which is exactly why it reads like a milk and wine: it is one, made deliberately and made better. They also note the useful comparison to Crinum ‘Schreck’: the Carroll Abbott flowers are wider, the red stripes narrower, and the stigma is red instead of white.
I’ve told customers in the past that this plant and our ‘Burbank’s White Queen’ were connected — that the two men behind those names traded bulbs back and forth in the early to mid 1900s. I need to take that back. Carroll Abbott was born in 1926, the year Luther Burbank died, and if this crinum is Marcelle Sheppard’s cross then it’s decades younger than that story requires. It doesn’t work. It was a nice thought and it isn’t true, and I’d rather say so here than let it keep going.
What’s true is better, anyway, and it’s Texan all the way down: a woman in East Texas made a crinum and named it for the man who saved Texas wildflowers.
Uses in the Landscape
It blooms in early spring, along with the other April and May bloomers — which is unusual company for a crinum and useful if you’re building a season. Most of the crinums I sell are a June and July proposition. This one has already had its say by then.
At about thirty inches it’s shorter than ‘Mrs. James Hendry’ or ‘Ellen Bosanquet’, which makes it easier to place. Put it where you’ll actually look at the flower, because the striping doesn’t read from across the yard the way a solid wine-red does. This is a plant that rewards standing close.
Planting & Care
Depth: Tip of the neck at or barely above soil level. Well-drained soil.
Sun: Sun to part sun; 8+ hours is best.
Zones: Plant Delights rates it 7b to 10b, at least. With C. bulbispermum in it, the cold end of that is credible — that’s the species that carries hardiness into this genus.
Blooms: Clusters of widely opened white flowers with a red band down the center of each petal, on 30″ stalks, April into May here.
Moving: Don’t. Give it a spot it can hold for twenty years.
The Reason It’s Eighty Dollars
Because there aren’t many, and because crinums move at the speed crinums move.
That’s the honest answer. This is not a plant anybody is mass-producing. When I say we only wish we had more, that’s not a sales line — it’s a description of our propagation beds. If you want it, and it’s listed, take it.
And then leave it alone for forty years. That’s the deal with this whole genus: the bulb gets enormous, the clump gets immovable, and long after you’ve stopped thinking about it, something white with a dark stripe comes up every April in a spot where nobody’s watering. Carroll Abbott spent his life trying to keep Texas plants from disappearing. This is a decent way to help.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com