The Crinum That Makes More Crinums
Quick to multiply, with beautiful pink trumpet blooms in the middle of summer.
J.C. Harvey is a delight. It’s strong enough to survive the worst the South can do and it still hands you cut flowers to take inside. Here at the cabin, the crinums are the reason summer is bearable. The heat gets to a point where it makes all of us believe nothing could possibly grow out there, much less bloom — and then somebody carries a stalk of these through the door and the whole argument is over. There is joy to be had with blooms in every season. This is the plant that proves it in the worst one.
Bees and butterflies adore it.
A Cross Somebody Made, By Somebody Nobody Knows
Here is everything the record actually contains.
The Pacific Bulb Society — which names crinum breeders as carefully as anyone alive — says this: Crinum ‘J.C. Harvey’ is a hybrid of C. zeylanicum × C. moorei made by J.C. Harvey. It offsets readily and is very common in the Southeastern United States. Plant Delights dates the cross to the 1900s.
That’s it. That’s the file.
I have looked for J.C. Harvey the man and I cannot hand you a first name, a town, or a year. He is initials on a flower. You will find him described in various places as a plantsman in Mexico, or in Texas, and I have not been able to stand any of it up, so I’m not going to repeat it here and let it harden into fact the way these things do. Somebody named Harvey crossed a Sri Lankan crinum with a South African one, sometime around the turn of the last century, and then the plant got away from him and colonized the entire American South, and we don’t know who he was.
That should bother me more than it does. In this genus it’s normal.
The Quiet Importance of This Plant
Here’s the part worth knowing, and it’s the reason a fifteen-dollar crinum gets a page of its own.
‘J.C. Harvey’ is very likely the parent of ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ — the most produced crinum in the world.
Thad Howard, in Bulbs for Warm Climates, says Louis Bosanquet never revealed the ancestry of his famous red. But the best guess in the literature, which PBS follows, is C. scabrum × ‘J.C. Harvey’. Tony Avent, writing in Walter, allows for C. moorei as the other side instead. Both readings keep J.C. Harvey in the pedigree.
Keep the hedge in mind — this is a “might be,” not a “was.” But if it’s right, then a Florida citrus farmer around 1915 reached for this pink crinum, crossed it with something he didn’t write down, and produced the plant that would define the genus for the next hundred years. And modern breeders are still going back to this well: Alani Davis’s ‘Antares’ and ‘Infusion’ are both ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ × ‘J.C. Harvey’ — the child crossed back onto the parent.
The cheapest crinum on the shelf is arguably the most influential one.
Shy to Flower? Plant It Deeper and Feed It
You may read that J.C. Harvey is shy to bloom. It has that reputation, and PBS notes it — and then immediately explains it away: most plants flower regularly if planted deeply and provided with adequate soil fertility and moisture.
I’ll add my own version of the same advice. Although some bulbs need a season under their belt to bloom, you can improve your odds of a first-season flower considerably:
Plant the bulb as soon as possible after it arrives. Water it moderately every day, with good drainage, for the first week — then every two or three days if you’re not getting significant rain. Fertilize moderately once a week for the first two weeks in the ground with a low-nitrogen fertilizer. Nitrogen gives you leaves. You want flowers.
Planting & Care
Depth: Neck at or barely above soil level, in well-drained soil.
Sun: 8+ hours a day.
Blooms: Pink trumpets in mid-summer — July for us. Six or so large, clear pink flowers per stalk, contrasting nicely with the darker reddish-pink buds still waiting behind them.
Foliage: Heavily ribbed and glossy green. A good backdrop.
Moving: Plant crinums where they won’t have to be moved for several years. Look at the photo of the clump we dug — that’s what you’d be fighting.
Give It Away
This crinum multiplies nearly as fast as a weed, and that is the highest praise I can offer.
Look at the dug clump in the photos. Every one of those offsets is a plant you could hand to somebody. In a few years you will have more J.C. Harvey than you have places to put J.C. Harvey, and at that point you become part of how it got here — because that is precisely how it went from one unknown man’s greenhouse to every old yard in the Southeast. Nobody shipped it. People carried it.
These bulbs go in the ground and stay for decades. The house may not. Dig a piece for a neighbor and keep the thing moving.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com