The Tidy One
Crinums are not tidy. I say that as a man who sells them.
The foliage sprawls. It flops on the ground, it browns at the tips, it takes up more room than you gave it and looks a little disreputable doing so. You put up with it because of what happens in June, and because the plant will outlive your house.
This one is different, and that’s the entire pitch. Crinum jagus ‘Scillafolia’ is a narrow-leaved form with rigid, upright foliage that stands more erect than most other crinums, and the foliage is extremely clean. It’s very handsome in garden settings. It blooms once in early summer, sometimes twice, with a nice vanilla-scented bloom, and propagation is rapid — it won’t take long for a nice clump to establish.
If the thing keeping you from planting crinums is that you’ve seen what they look like in August, look at this one.
How This Differs from the Jagus You Already Know
We sell Crinum jagus as its own thing, and it deserves the separate page — it has 241 years of botanical record behind it, it came out of West Africa, it went to Britain in 1792, and it carries the finest foliage in the genus along with a couple of common names, harmattan lily and St. Christopher lily.
This is the same species. Same plant, botanically speaking. What you’re buying here is a narrow-leaved, stiffly upright form of it, where the standard jagus has broader leaves.
Everything true of the species is true here — the vanilla scent, the tenderness, the clean foliage, the rapid increase. If you want the history, go read that page; I’m not going to retype 241 years of it. What this page is about is the form, and why the form has a name that isn’t quite a real name.
A Name That Was Never Published
Here’s the honest situation, and I think it’s more interesting than a fake pedigree would be.
The Pacific Bulb Society — the most careful source on this genus — says of Crinum jagus that there are many forms, sometimes given variety names, although these variety names have not been published. They then describe the one called scillafolia: native to Africa, rigid narrow upright foliage, white flowers. That’s it. That’s the whole record.
“Have not been published” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It means that when I write Crinum jagus ‘Scillafolia’ on a label, I am not using a botanical name in the sense a botanist would recognize. Nobody described this form in a journal, nobody deposited a type specimen, nobody validated the name. It’s a label that growers agreed on because they needed to tell two plants apart, and it stuck.
That’s true of a few of the jagus forms. There’s one called rattrayi with wide upright leaves. There’s one called vanillodorum whose fragrance is emphatically vanilla, and whose backstory — I love this — is that the Pacific Bulb Society’s plant descends from a seed of a plant that their source’s grandmother stole from Fairchild Tropical Gardens, in the 1960s if not earlier. Their own note on whether that name is correct: “I cannot say.”
Nobody in this genus can say. I’d rather tell you that than pretend the label on the pot is science. The plant is real, the form is real and recognizable, and the name is a convenience we all agreed to. In crinums, that describes most of the names.
The One Crinum You Can Kill
I need to put this up front rather than bury it, because it cuts against everything else I tell you about this genus.
This is a tender species. It definitely must stay closer to coastal regions, though it’s been seen doing nicely as far north as 8a. Below that, the bulb can be damaged or lost.
Everywhere else in this library I promise you a plant that treats drought and flood and neglect as weather rather than emergencies, that outlives the house it was planted beside, that you cannot get out of the ground with a shovel. All of that is true, and none of it is a property of the genus. It’s a property of Crinum bulbispermum, which is the species that carries cold hardiness into these hybrids, and which is not in this plant at all.
Crinum jagus comes from tropical West Africa. It has never needed to survive a hard freeze and it has not learned how.
So: Gulf Coast, coastal South, a protected spot in 8a if you’re feeling lucky and you mulch. If you’re in Dallas or Tyler, grow it in a pot and bring it in, or grow something else. I would rather lose the sale than sell you a zone I can’t stand behind.
Uses in the Landscape
Play the foliage. That’s the whole reason this plant exists in the trade.
Narrow, rigid and upright means it reads as a vertical accent instead of a mound — closer in effect to a dwarf iris clump or a small yucca than to a floppy crinum. That makes it usable in tight, formal, or visible spots where a regular crinum would look like it needed a haircut. Near a door. Along a walk. Anywhere the plant is on duty year round and the flower is a bonus.
The vanilla is worth siting for. Put it where people stop moving — a porch, a patio, a bench. A once-a-year vanilla-scented bloom on a plant nobody walks past is a waste of a vanilla-scented bloom.
And since propagation is rapid, plant one and plan on a clump. That’s unusual here; most of the good crinums make you wait years.
Planting & Care
Zones: Coastal regions. Known to do nicely as far north as 8a. Not a cold-hardy plant — see above.
Depth: Neck at or barely above soil level, like the rest of the genus.
Sun: Sun to part sun. The jagus types generally appreciate a break from the hardest sun.
Soil: Well drained.
Blooms: Once in early summer, sometimes twice. White, vanilla-scented.
Increase: Rapid. A nice clump establishes quickly.
Shipping: Spring-shipped — it goes out March 15 to May 15, which is when it wants planting. Order anytime to reserve.
A Plant Without Papers
Most of the pages in this library end with a hundred-year-old bulb blooming at a fallen-down homesite. This one can’t, and I won’t pretend otherwise — it wouldn’t survive the kind of place where I find the others.
What it has instead is a different kind of persistence, and it’s the one that runs underneath this whole genus. Somebody in Africa noticed that a particular jagus stood up straight and had narrow leaves. Somebody called it the squill-leaved one, because that’s what scillafolia means and that’s what it looks like. And then it moved, plant to plant, grower to grower, for long enough that the name outlasted whoever coined it — without ever once being written down in a way that counts.
There’s no registry for crinums. No committee, no forms, nobody adjudicating. There’s a network of people who kept track of each other, and the plants are the record they left. That network is imprecise and it loses names and it gets things wrong. It is also, so far, the only thing that has ever gotten a single one of these bulbs from anywhere to anywhere.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com