A Big Flower on a Big Plant
Crinum ‘Elizabeth Traub’ is a 1930s hybrid with dark rose pink flowers and a white eye.
It’s a large plant, with scapes sometimes reaching well over three feet. Its best showing is in early summer, but it will bloom intermittently throughout. When the large dark flowers open, it can make a splash in an otherwise quiet garden — and “otherwise quiet” is the honest description of most southern gardens in July.
The white eye is the thing. A lot of crinums are dark pink. Not many have that clean throat cutting through the middle of the color, and it’s the reason this flower reads from across a yard instead of turning into a purple smudge.
Hamilton Traub
This is one of the few crinums in my catalog where I can name the breeder without a hedge.
The Pacific Bulb Society records it plainly: Crinum ‘Elizabeth Traub’ is a hybrid of C. scabrum × C. ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ made by Hamilton Traub. Plant Delights says the same thing from the other direction, calling it an ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ hybrid from the late Hamilton Traub. Two sources, same cross, same man.
Hamilton Traub was not a nurseryman with a good eye. He was the authority on the Amaryllidaceae for a generation — the founder of the American Plant Life Society and the editor of Herbertia, the journal where most of what we know about this family got written down in the first place. When the crinum world argues about parentage and nomenclature, it is very often arguing with or about Traub.
So look at what he did here. The most influential amaryllid taxonomist in America took Louis Bosanquet’s Florida red — a plant with no recorded parentage, made by a citrus farmer who never told anybody what he’d crossed — and put it back to work as a parent. The scientist built on the amateur. That’s not a small thing, and it tells you what the professionals thought of ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ by the 1930s.
Who Was Elizabeth?
I don’t know, and I’m going to say so rather than guess.
The obvious assumption is a wife or a daughter — that’s how these names usually work, and it’s how ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ works, and it’s probably right here too. But probably right is not the same as documented, and I have not found a source that tells me who Elizabeth Traub was. I’m not going to hand you a relationship I can’t source. She was somebody Hamilton Traub thought enough of to put on his best red-pink cross, and that’s where the record stops for me.
The Honest Warning: Stake It
Here’s the part the sales copy usually skips.
PBS notes that the scapes are tall — up to four feet — and that they sometimes flop if not staked.
I’d rather you hear that from me. On most of my crinum pages I’m bragging that the flowers don’t flop over, because for most of them that’s true and it’s the whole difference between a crinum and the gladiolus everybody hates. Elizabeth Traub is the one where I have to hedge it. Big flower, tall scape, and physics doesn’t care whose name is on the plant.
In practice this means: plant it somewhere with a little shelter from wind, or against something it can lean on, or accept that in a wet year with a heavy head you may be putting a stake in. It’s not a reason to skip the plant. It’s a reason to place it thoughtfully instead of dropping it in the middle of an open bed.
Uses in the Landscape
Treat it as a back-of-the-border plant, because at four feet it isn’t going anywhere else.
Like the rest of the genus, the base wants company — salvia, lantana, phlox at the ankles while the scapes work overhead. And put it where you need the July show, not where you need April. A crinum’s whole value proposition is holding the season nobody else will hold.
Planting & Care
Depth: Neck of the bulb at or barely above soil level, in well-drained soil.
Sun: Full summer sun is fine; 8+ hours is best. A little late-afternoon shade is a bonus.
Blooms: Best show in early summer, then intermittently through the season.
Support: See above. Tall scapes, heavy heads.
Moving: Crinums resent it. Plant it where it can stay for decades.
Currently on the Waiting List
This one isn’t in stock, and I’d rather tell you why than just show you a grey button.
Elizabeth Traub is slow. That’s it. Sixty-two dollars and a waiting list are what happens when a plant makes offsets on its own schedule and there is no way to hurry it — you cannot force a crinum, and the ones I can sell you cheaply are simply the ones that breed like rabbits. If you want on the list, email us at info@southernbulbs.com.
The compensation is that the wait is the last waiting you’ll do. Ninety years after a taxonomist in a lab crossed two crinums and named the result for a woman whose identity I can’t recover, her flower is still opening dark rose with a white eye every June. Get one in the ground and it will be doing it for whoever owns your house in 2100.
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