The Crinum You’ve Already Seen
Drive through any old neighborhood in a warm climate in May and you will pass this plant. You may not have known it had a name.
White petals with a wine stripe down each one. Blooms larger than an amaryllis. It’s one of the first crinums to bloom every summer, and if the early summer stays cool, each of the two or three spikes a bulb throws will hold for a couple of weeks — which gives you close to a month of them.
The spicy fragrance is usually triggered after a good rain. You’ll notice it before you notice the flower.
The Name Is a Mess, and That’s the Story
I have to be straight with you about this one, because a lot of people aren’t.
“Milk and wine lily” is a folk name, not a botanical one, and it has been hung on several different crinums over the last two hundred years. The name describes the flower — milky white, wine-striped — and any crinum that looks like that has been liable to get called it. Crinum zeylanicum carries the name. So do various crosses of C. zeylanicum and C. bulbispermum. So does Crinum × herbertii, the hybrid the Honourable and Reverend William Herbert made in England in the early 1800s — Herbert being the man the whole genus’s hybridizers have been arguing with ever since.
Which one is ours? There are several crinums that are called “milk and wine,” but we believe this one to be Crinum × herbertii. Believe. Not know. I sell it under that name because that’s my best reading of the plant, and I’d rather tell you it’s a best reading than pretend the genus is tidier than it is.
And here’s the thing: the confusion is not a failure of scholarship. It’s the fingerprint of how this plant actually traveled. Nobody who dug a piece of this and handed it over a fence was consulting a register. They called it what it looked like. It got to Texas in the back of a wagon and in the trunks of cars and in coffee cans, under a name that described it, from people who had no idea what species they were holding. A plant with a clean pedigree is a plant that went through the trade. This one went through hands.
Moly
There’s a line I think about every time I try to dig one of these.
In Book X of the Odyssey, Hermes hands Odysseus an herb to protect him from Circe. Samuel Butler’s translation:
“As he spoke he pulled the herb out of the ground and showed me what it was like. The root was black, while the flower was as white as milk; the gods call it Moly, and mortal men cannot uproot it, but the gods can do whatever they like.”
Now — I am not going to tell you Homer was describing a crinum. Scholars have been arguing about what moly was for twenty-five centuries and they aren’t close to done, and I’m a bulb farmer in East Texas, not a classicist. Snowdrop is the usual guess.
But if you have ever tried to dig a mature clump of crinum, that line lands. It truly feels as if no mortal man can uproot them. It can actually be done. I encourage everyone to try it — once. After that, come see me and buy some I’ve already dug.
No Crinum in the South Has Ever Died
My former professor, Dr. Bill Welch, once said that, and I’ve never been able to disprove it.
You don’t need to worry about killing this plant. The only reliable method I know is Round Up. That’s it. That’s the list.
The reason is the bulb. It’s enormous, it’s full of stored energy, and it goes down deep and stays. That’s why the milk and wine is the crinum you see at the falling-down house — it doesn’t need the house, or the people, or the water. It was here before the family arrived and it will be here after the county bulldozes the slab. Once you have this flower, you have it for a lifetime, and so does whoever owns the place after you.
Uses in the Landscape
The foliage can be a little messy. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. It maintains a nice appearance with a little grooming and, more importantly, with company.
Plant it with salvia, lantana, plumbago, phlox — summer perennials that complement the bold, grass-like foliage and cover the base of the clump while the flower stalks do their work up top. Let something else handle the ankles.
Planting & Care
Depth: The tip of the neck right at or barely above soil level. Every year somebody buries one and wonders why it sulks.
Sun: 8+ hours. Full summer sun is fine.
Soil: Well drained is ideal, but this plant is famously unfussy — it handles clay, sand, and ground that stays wet.
Blooms: Two to three spikes per bulb, early summer, each holding a couple of weeks in a cool spring.
Moving: Plant it where it stays. A moved crinum takes a season off out of spite.
Sizes: All sizes eventually produce the same flowers. Bigger bulbs simply get there sooner and start making offsets sooner. The jumbos are softball-size or larger — serious objects.
Dig a Piece for Somebody
This is the quintessential crinum, and it got everywhere the same way it will get to your neighbor: somebody dug a piece and handed it over.
The bulb makes offsets around the mother. After a few years you’ll have more than you planted. When you do, give some away — under whatever name you like. That’s how it’s always worked. The name confusion I complained about up top is just what two centuries of generosity looks like when you try to write it down.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com