A Hybrid That Nobody Made
Crinum × digweedii, the Nassau lily, is not a variety. It’s a family — a whole group of hybrids sharing one set of parents, most of them without names, showing up in old yards and cemeteries around the Gulf and the Southeast.
My own store copy says this plant is an offspring of Crinum americanum, our native swamp lily, and a special thanks to the crinum experts who helped us with the identification. That’s right, and I want to fill in the rest of what they were telling me. The Pacific Bulb Society defines C. × digweedii as the name used for hybrids of C. americanum crossed with C. scabrum. So: our swamp lily on one side, and on the other the African striping species that stands behind the milk and wine lilies.
The flowers open widely and are usually very fragrant. The striping is the interesting part — it’s genuinely variable across this group, running anywhere from pale pink to deep red or vanishing altogether. That’s not a defect in the plants. It’s what happens when a cross gets made over and over by different bees in different yards over a long time, and nobody is selecting for anything.
Where the American Half Comes From
Half of this plant is from here.
Crinum americanum is the swamp lily — a genuine native of the southeastern United States, wet ditches and pond edges and spillways, white spidery blooms from spring into fall. It’s the only crinum on my list that was already here when everybody else showed up.
I should correct something on my own store page while I’m here: I’ve had C. americanum down as the native crinum of the southwestern United States. It’s southeastern. Florida, the Gulf, up the coast — not the desert. That’s a slip of a word and it’s my slip, and it matters a little because the whole point of this plant is where it’s from.
The other half is C. scabrum, out of Africa, which arrived in the South the way most of these did: in a boat, in somebody’s care, a long time ago. Once the two of them were growing in the same warm country, this cross was going to happen whether anyone intended it or not. And it did, repeatedly. That’s why C. × digweedii is a group and not a plant.
What “Nassau Lily” Tells You, and What It Doesn’t
The common name points at the Bahamas, and I’d love to tell you the story behind that. I can’t. I have not been able to run down where the Nassau name attached, or when, or why, and I’d rather say that than build you an etymology out of nothing.
The same goes for Digweed, whoever he was. His name is on a hybrid group that thousands of people grow, and I have not found the man. If somebody can point me at him I’ll put him on this page.
What I can tell you is where a few of the named ones were found, and the list reads like the whole thesis of my business. The Pacific Bulb Society has one they call ‘Gonzalez’, after the small historic community north of Pensacola, Florida, where somebody found it growing. They have another they simply call ‘Old City Cemetery’. Not bred. Not registered. Found — in a cemetery, blooming, decades after the last person who planted anything there stopped coming.
What You’re Actually Buying
Be clear-eyed about this one. You are buying a member of a variable group, not a named clone, and I’d be lying if I told you I could promise you a particular stripe.
The flowers will be white, they will open wide, and they will very likely be strongly fragrant. The striping may be deep red, may be pale pink, may not show up. If you want a guaranteed dark stripe, buy ‘Stars and Stripes’ — which, as it happens, is a digweedii too, one that Thad Howard made deliberately and selected hard for exactly that trait. This is the same cross without the selection.
That’s not a lesser thing. It’s an older thing. It’s what the cross does on its own.
Uses in the Landscape
The americanum half brings water tolerance to the party, and that’s the angle I’d play. This is a plant for the low spot — the place that stays damp, the edge of a rain garden, the ground where you’ve already killed two things that wanted drainage.
It is not as absolutely committed to the bog as the pure swamp lily is; the African half moderates it. Think of it as a crinum with an unusually high tolerance for wet feet rather than a plant that demands them. And give it room. The American species in this group spread by long rhizomes underground, and a plant with that habit will get where it’s going.
Planting & Care
Depth: Neck at or barely above soil level, like the rest of them.
Sun: Full sun to part sun.
Soil: Adaptable, and more tolerant of damp ground than most crinums. It doesn’t need standing water.
Blooms: Summer. Wide white flowers, usually strongly fragrant, striping variable.
Room: Give it some. It can run.
Shipping: This is a spring-shipped bulb — it goes out March 15 to May 15, which is when it wants to be planted. Order any time to reserve.
The Case for an Unnamed Plant
Most of what I sell has a name on it, and usually a person behind the name — a Bosanquet, an Abbott, a Howard. Those pages are easier to write. There’s a story with a shape to it.
This one doesn’t have that, and I’ve come to think it’s the more representative plant of the two kinds. Somewhere along the Gulf, an African crinum and an American crinum ended up in the same wet ground and made something that was tougher than either one. Nobody supervised it. Nobody named it for years, and when names finally got attached they were the names of places — a community north of Pensacola, an old city cemetery — because there was no person to name it for.
And it’s still out there. That’s the part that gets me. These things are standing in ditches and burial grounds across the coastal South right now, unlabeled, unregistered, unbothered, doing the thing they’ve done since before anybody thought to write it down. I find them. I don’t make them. Every so often I’m reminded which of those two jobs is the real one.
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