Back After a Long Time Away
The Crinum bulbispermum ‘Sacramento’ hasn’t been offered by us for a long time, and there’s a reason, which I’ll get to.
It looks something like the milk and wine — but instead of just stripes on the petals, the Sacramento’s blooms each have a wine-colored throat, with fainter stripes starting to come out of that throat and run up the petal. Turn a bloom over and the back of the petal is striped darker than the inside. Sometimes the flowers come nearly white.
The really fun thing is what happens on a single stalk. You may find white trumpets with light striping and bright wine-colored blooms with deep stripes, on the same stem, at the same time. People ask how you got two flowers on one stalk. No two stalks are the same.
The leaves are long, up to three feet, with a bluish tint — the classic blue-green bulbispermum foliage, which is a good-looking thing in its own right.
What the Record Says, and What It Doesn’t
The story you’ll find, and the fullest one available, comes from Plant Delights: ‘Sacramento’ has a mysterious background, but is reportedly a Les Hannibal cross between two forms of Crinum bulbispermum, one of which originated in the town of Kimberley, South Africa.
I’m keeping that “reportedly” exactly where I found it. It’s their hedge and it’s an honest one, and the alternative is me telling you a pedigree that the people with the best crinum records in the country won’t state flatly.
Les Hannibal was one of the significant American crinum men of the twentieth century — the Pacific Bulb Society carries his crosses, and if you grow crinums his fingerprints are on some of them. He gardened at Fair Oaks, California, which is a suburb of Sacramento. That is almost certainly where the name comes from, and I’ll say almost certainly rather than certainly, because I have not found the sentence that says so and I’ve been burned before by an inference that read too well.
What isn’t in doubt: this is a Crinum bulbispermum, and that’s the important part of its identity. Bulbispermum is the South African species that carries cold hardiness into this entire genus. Every crinum in my catalog that survives a real winter has bulbispermum somewhere in it. This one isn’t a hybrid reaching for that toughness — it is that.
The Reason It’s Rare
This crinum produces offsets much more slowly than other crinums. It will take many years for a bulb to begin making babies at all.
That is exactly why it’s treasured and why it’s rare, and it’s why we couldn’t offer it for years. Because ‘Sacramento’ hardly offsets, it’s produced mainly as seedlings — and the good news buried in that inconvenience is that the seedlings come true to type. Most crinums you buy are a division of a division of a division, a clone of a clone. This one largely isn’t. You’re getting seed-grown plants of a strain that holds its character, which is an unusual thing in this genus and part of why the flowers vary so entertainingly stalk to stalk.
So the same trait is the whole problem and the whole charm. It won’t multiply for you quickly either. Buy it because you want it, not because you’re planning to fill a fence line.
The Earliest Crinum
In North Carolina, Plant Delights reports this as the earliest crinum to flower — starting in late March or early April.
That’s worth planning around. Most of what I sell in this genus is a June and July proposition. If you build a crinum bed out of Sacramento, Carroll Abbott, milk and wine, then Bradley and Mrs. James Hendry, you’ve got flowers from April to Thanksgiving out of one family of plants in one bed.
Planting & Care
Zones: It flourishes in hot southern summers even in zone 10, and works as far north as zone 7, where it survives the cold. The bulbispermum blood is doing that.
Depth: Tip of the neck right at or barely above soil level, in well-drained soil.
Sun: 8+ hours a day. Full summer sun is fine; a little late-afternoon shade is a bonus.
Blooms: Multiple 3–5″ trumpets per stalk, on strong erect stalks 3–4 feet tall. They look great in the garden or cut for the house.
Vacation: They’re hardy and do well while you’re away, which is the practical point of the whole genus.
Moving: Crinums don’t like to be moved, so it won’t bloom for you the first year. Give it time to adjust and enjoy the display next year.
The Slow One
There’s a particular pleasure in a plant that won’t be hurried.
Most of the crinum’s reputation rests on brute endurance — the football-sized bulb, the clump you can’t dig, the flowers coming up every summer at a homesite where the house burned down before you were born. Sacramento has all of that. It just also refuses to make you copies. It sits there being blue-green and enormous and singular, and every few years it hands you a stalk where half the flowers are white and half are wine and nobody, including the plant, seems to have decided in advance.
Fifteen dollars, one bulb, and probably the rest of your life. Go ahead.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com