The One Everybody Means
When somebody says “crinum” and means a red one, they mean this one.
Ellen Bosanquet is the benchmark. It is the most produced crinum cultivar in the world, and it earned that the honest way — by being deep wine-red in the middle of a southern July, when almost nothing else has the nerve. These are extremely tough bulbs that give you deep rose flowers during the hottest part of our summer, and they are valued as much for standing up straight in that heat as for the color itself.
Depending on the light, the blooms read deep pink or nearly burgundy. Same flower, same afternoon. It just depends on where the sun is.
A Citrus Farmer in Fruitland Park
Ellen Bosanquet was a real woman, and her husband made this flower for her.
Louis Percival Bosanquet (1865–1930) was a citrus farmer and horticulturist at Fruitland Park, Florida. He was born into a wealthy English family descended from French Huguenot exiles — which is why the name looks French and isn’t. He left England in 1888 to join his brothers Augustus and Eugene in central Florida, where they built an estate called Fair Oaks: a hundred acres, an eleven-room house, twenty acres of oranges and mandarins. Around 1893 Augustus left for Lisbon and handed Louis the place. Louis then did what a certain kind of man does when he inherits land and time — he planted over a thousand species of trees and plants on it and built what was reportedly the largest horticultural library in Florida.
He married Ellen Lewis Hall — a descendant of George Washington — on the 4th of November, 1891. He began hybridizing lilies in the early 1900s, and around 1915 he made the cross that carries her name. He made other crinums, including one named for himself. None of them ever came close.
About the pronunciation, since everybody asks: it’s Boz-an-ket, or Boz-an-kwet. Not the French way. He was English.
What We Don’t Know About It
Here’s where I’d rather tell you the truth than sound smart.
Nobody knows for certain what Ellen Bosanquet’s parents were. Thad Howard, who wrote the book on bulbs for warm climates, says plainly that Bosanquet never revealed the ancestry. The best guess in the literature is that one parent was the hybrid Crinum ‘J.C. Harvey’ — the pink one I also sell — crossed with either C. scabrum or C. moorei. The Pacific Bulb Society, following Howard, puts it as C. scabrum × ‘J.C. Harvey’. Tony Avent, writing in Walter magazine, allows for moorei.
So: probably J.C. Harvey and something. That’s as far as the record goes, and I’m not going to walk it further than it goes. A man in Florida made a cross a hundred and ten years ago and didn’t write down what went into it, and now the most popular crinum in the world has no papers. That is very much how this genus works.
What we can say without hedging is that it has been around for over a century and it has proven itself in the kind of summer that kills things.
What Greg Grant Says About Crinums
My friend Greg Grant put it better than I can:
“I don’t know of any plant which has been ignored by modern gardeners of the South to the extent that crinums have. There is probably no other flowering perennial which can be classed as both extremely drought tolerant and aquatic, while providing stunning displays of fragrant, cut flower quality blossoms. If you have them, appreciate them, because they are truly unique Southern perennials.”
Extremely drought tolerant and aquatic. Read that twice. That’s not a slogan, that’s the actual botanical situation, and Ellen Bosanquet is the plant that demonstrates it in the most gardens.
Uses in the Landscape
The best use of ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ I have ever seen was at the public gardens in Fredericksburg, Texas, where some astute landscape planner had run them en masse with wax leaf begonias skirting the base. High-traffic public ground, no babying, and they looked like a million dollars.
In our own gardens we skirt them with salvia, lantana, or summer-blooming phlox. One year I used a low white meadow sage (Salvia nemorosa), though part of me always wants to combine them with the larger and wilder Salvia leucantha. We have an ongoing argument in our house about “nice and tidy” plants versus plants with a little less form. The tight, compact nemorosa brought structure to my crinum plantings and satisfied both parties, which is the only diplomatic victory I’ve won in that garden.
The foliage is lush and green and fills an area quickly while the blooms shoot up on stems three to four feet tall. Give them room to multiply.
Planting & Care
Depth: Plant with the tip of the neck right at, or barely above, soil level. Not buried. This is the single most common mistake.
Sun: Crinum perform best with 8+ hours a day. They’ll take full summer sun. If you have a little shade in the late afternoon, that’s a bonus, not a requirement.
Soil: Well drained.
Zones: It flourishes in hot southern summers as far south as zone 10, and works as far north as zone 7, where it survives the cold.
Blooms: Multiple 3–5″ trumpets per stalk, on strong erect stalks 3–4 feet tall. Heaviest in June; older, well-established clumps keep blossoming on and off the rest of the summer. They don’t flop.
Moving: Don’t. Crinums resent being moved and will sulk a season over it. Plant it where it’s going to live.
Vacation: This is a real selling point and not a joke. Summer means trips, and everybody worries about what dies while they’re gone. Ellen Bosanquet does fine while you’re away.
A Bulb That Outlives the House
A mature Ellen Bosanquet bulb is an absurd object. Our jumbo grade is softball size or larger — these are serious bulbs, and I’m not being cute when I say you could hurt somebody with one. That mass is the whole explanation. It is a decade of stored summers, and it is why the plant treats drought and flood and neglect as weather rather than as emergencies.
It is also why I find them where I find them. A hundred years after Louis Bosanquet crossed two crinums for his wife in Florida, her flower is still coming up wine-red every June in yards where the house has fallen in and nobody has watered anything since the Eisenhower administration. She has outlasted the estate, the orange grove, and the man.
Plant one. It will outlast you too, and that’s the point.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com