Fifteen Stalks and Counting
Take a milk and wine crinum. Keep everything that makes it good — the white flower, the wine stripe, the constitution of a fire hydrant. Now give it four or five times as many blooms on every stalk, and have it throw fifteen stalks in a season instead of three.
That’s ‘Schreck’.
If the old milk and wine is the toughest bulb in the garden — and I’ve said in print that it is — then this one is tougher. I don’t say that lightly and I don’t say it often. Each spike can hold its flowers for a couple of weeks, and the spikes keep coming through the summer. It’s the same plant in kind and a different plant in degree.
A Family Name from Vidor, Texas
Here’s what I love about this plant: the name isn’t a tribute, and it isn’t marketing. It’s just where it came from.
The Pacific Bulb Society keeps the clearest account of it. ‘Schreck’ was named and distributed by Marcelle Sheppard, the East Texas crinum breeder, and she got it from the Schreck family of Vidor, Texas, by way of her friend Ruth Dubuisson. That’s the whole chain: a family in Vidor had it, Ruth knew about it, Marcelle got it, Marcelle put it into the world under the name of the people whose yard it was in.
Vidor is forty-odd miles east of Houston, close enough to the Louisiana line to argue about. Somebody there grew a crinum that was better than the common one, and the reason you can buy it today is that a woman with a good eye noticed and had the standing to say so. My own copy has said for years that this crinum “owes its popularity to plant enthusiast Marcelle Sheppard, who noticed the difference in this type of Milk and Wine Crinum and used her influence in the plant world to bring it to light.” That’s still exactly right. I’d only add the two names underneath hers — the Schrecks and Ruth Dubuisson — because they’re the reason there was anything to notice.
What We Don’t Know, and Why That’s Normal Here
Nobody knows who made this cross, or whether anybody made it on purpose at all.
By its parentage it’s Crinum × herbertii — C. bulbispermum crossed with C. scabrum, the same combination behind the old milk and wine lilies. But knowing the parentage of a group is not the same as knowing the history of a plant. A seedling came up in somebody’s yard in southeast Texas at some point, and it was better than its neighbors, and nobody wrote anything down. My store copy puts it plainly and I’ll leave it that way: many wish they knew the story behind the breeding of this plant.
I want to be honest that this is the ordinary condition of crinums, not a special failure. There is no crinum registry. No governing body, no register of record, nobody adjudicating. What we have instead is a network of gardeners who kept track of each other. That network is how ‘Schreck’ got to you, and the price of it is that the paperwork is thin. I’d rather have the plant.
Telling It from ‘Carroll Abbott’
These two look enough alike to fool people, including people who should know better. They are both C. × herbertii, both white with red stripes, both good. Here is how to tell them apart, and this comes straight from the Pacific Bulb Society’s side-by-side:
The stigma. ‘Schreck’ has a white stigma. ‘Carroll Abbott’ has a red one. That’s the fastest check.
The background. On the back of a ‘Schreck’ petal, the red stripe is sharply defined against a white background. On ‘Carroll Abbott’ the color bleeds, so the stripe sits on a light pink background instead.
The center. The stripes on ‘Schreck’ are broader on the inner petals, especially near the base, so the whole flower reads redder in the middle. ‘Carroll Abbott’ opens wider and flatter with narrower stripes.
If you’ve got one and want the other, they’re different enough to be worth it.
Uses in the Landscape
Fifteen stalks is a lot of plant. Give it the room that implies.
The bloom sequence is what makes it useful. A crinum that gives you one glorious week is a fine thing; a crinum that keeps sending up spikes for weeks on end is a different kind of asset, because it holds a bed together while other things come and go around it. Skirt the base with something low — salvia, lantana, phlox — and let the crinum be the vertical.
Put it where somebody walks past. The striping is detail work, and detail work needs to be seen from close.
Planting & Care
Depth: The tip of the neck goes at or barely above soil level. Not buried. This is the mistake everybody makes once.
Sun: Eight hours or better. Full southern sun is fine.
Soil: Well drained. It will forgive worse, but drainage is what it actually wants.
Zones: With C. bulbispermum in the parentage, the cold end holds up better than most crinums — that’s the species that carries hardiness into this genus. Zone 7 gardeners should mulch over the crown for a hard winter.
Moving: Don’t. Pick the spot like you mean it.
Two Sizes, and What Each One Actually Buys You
We sell ‘Schreck’ two ways, and they’re genuinely different purchases.
The 1-gallon pot ($45) is a growing plant with roots already working. You put it in the ground, it keeps doing what it was doing. It’s the lower-risk way in and the easier planting job, and it’s what I’d hand somebody who hasn’t grown crinums before.
The jumbo bulb ($90) is a different animal. Jumbo means blooming size and well established — the right size to start throwing offsets, with mature blooms. It is not a plant that has to get somewhere; it’s a plant that is already there. It will just keep getting better and better. If you want the fifteen-stalk performance sooner rather than in three years, this is how you buy it.
Neither is better. One is a head start on time, the other is a head start on size.
The Yard It Came Out Of
I find crinums at places people have left. That’s most of my job. The house is down, the fence is on the ground, and the bulb is still there doing exactly what it did the year the family moved out, because it is too large and too deep and too indifferent to care.
‘Schreck’ didn’t come to me that way. It came out of a yard where somebody was still living, and it got to the rest of us because a neighbor mentioned it to a friend who mentioned it to a woman who knew a good crinum when she saw one. That’s the other way these plants travel, and it’s the older way of the two. Long before anybody had a nursery, this is how a bulb got from one place to another: somebody noticed, and somebody handed it over.
The Schreck family’s name is on it now. They’ll be attached to a flower in Texas gardens long after anyone remembers why, which is a strange and pretty good form of permanence.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com