The Signature Mark, Turned All the Way Up
The signature mark of a great many crinums is a dark pink, red, or burgundy line running down an otherwise solid white petal. It’s the family gesture. Milk and wine does it. ‘Schreck’ does it. ‘Carroll Abbott’ does it.
‘Stars and Stripes’ celebrates that pattern in one of the most intense ways known to crinum hybrids. The stripes are wide and they are genuinely dark red, not a pink that flatters itself. And the flower opens wide, which matters more than it sounds like it should — an open flower gives the onlooker, who tends to be a little awestruck, a clear view of what is actually happening in there. Plenty of striped crinums make you work for it. This one hands it over.
Thad Howard Made This
The Pacific Bulb Society gives ‘Stars and Stripes’ to T.M. Howard — Thad Howard, of San Antonio, who wrote Bulbs for Warm Climates and is the closest thing this genus has to a founding document.
The parentage they record is Crinum erubescens × Crinum scabrum. That’s worth sitting with for a second, because it explains the plant. C. scabrum is where the stripe comes from — it’s the striping parent behind most of the great banded crinums, milk and wine included. C. erubescens is a New World species, Central and South American, close kin to our own native swamp lily and named for the red blush on its flower stalks. Howard crossed the American plant with the striping plant and pushed the stripe as far as it would go.
He did the same trick, in the same years, with the crinum I sell as ‘Summer Nocturne’ — erubescens again, crossed the other direction into C. moorei. Howard kept coming back to that American species. He was working the border country of Texas and Mexico for decades, and it shows in what he made.
A Word About the Name on the Label
If you look this plant up you’ll find it filed as Crinum × digweedii, and if you then look up C. × digweedii you’ll find it defined as C. americanum × C. scabrum — not erubescens × scabrum. That looks like a contradiction. It isn’t quite one, and the explanation is worth knowing because it’s the whole condition of this genus in miniature.
Crinum erubescens has also been called C. americanum forma erubescens, and C. americanum var. robustum. In other words, some authorities treat it as its own species and some treat it as a form of the swamp lily. Under the second reading, erubescens × scabrum and americanum × scabrum are the same cross wearing different hats, and calling this plant a digweedii is perfectly coherent.
So: the plant is not in dispute. The names for its parents are. I could hide that from you and print one tidy botanical name, but the tidy version would be a guess dressed as a fact, and there’s enough of that in this business already. If you want to go further into it, I’ve written up the Nassau lily, which is the same hybrid group without a cultivar name on it.
Uses in the Landscape
It blooms mid-summer and sometimes into fall, which puts it in the thin part of the year — after the June crinums are spent and before anything autumn shows up.
Plant it close. I say that about all the striped ones and I mean it most about this one, because the whole point is the pattern and the pattern is a close-range event. A solid wine-red like ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ reads from across a yard. A stripe does not. Put this where people walk, near a path or a door, and let it do its work at conversational distance.
Planting & Care
Depth: Tip of the neck at or barely above soil level, in well-drained ground.
Sun: Eight hours plus.
Blooms: Mid-summer, sometimes into fall.
Getting a first-season bloom. Some bulbs want a season under their belt before they’ll flower. If you want to improve your odds this year, do this: plant the bulb as soon as it arrives; water moderately every day for the first week, with good drainage; then every two or three days if there’s no real rain; and fertilize moderately once a week for the first two weeks in the ground, with a low-nitrogen fertilizer. Low nitrogen is the part people skip. High nitrogen buys you a beautiful pile of leaves and no flowers.
Moving: Don’t. Crinums resent it and will sulk a year over it.
Why There Aren’t Many
‘Stars and Stripes’ does not propagate as fast as other crinums. That’s the honest reason for the price and the honest reason we don’t always have it.
I’ve made my peace with it. The bulb takes its time making more bulbs, and there’s no lever to pull that changes that — crinums move at the speed crinums move, and pushing them just gets you a sulking crinum. So you wait, and in the meantime the plant fills the garden with a show-stopping bloom, which is not the worst way to spend the wait.
We have five right now. When they’re gone they’re gone for a while.
What you’re buying, if you buy one, is a plant that a Texas botanist made on purpose sixty years ago because he wanted to see how far a red line down a white petal could go — and then it turned out to be tough enough to outlive him, and me, and probably you. That’s the trade with this genus. It’s slow on the front end and permanent on the back.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com