Pink Blossoms with Darker Stripes
Most striped crinums are white with a colored line. This one is pink with a darker line, and that is a genuinely uncommon thing to see.
Scott Ogden, in Garden Bulbs for the South, calls them “exquisite pink blossoms accented by burgundy stripes,” and I’ve never found a better six words for it. The buds come up deep pink to burgundy and then open to a bright, clear pink with the stripe running through. Thirteen to fifteen sweetly fragrant flowers on a stalk. In the hottest part of the summer the pink will sometimes fade toward an almost-white — that’s the plant reacting to a Texas August, not a fault.
It’s a large plant with lush green foliage, thirty to forty inches of it, and then the spikes go up higher than that. Figure two to three feet wide at maturity. If you already grow crinums, this one adds something you don’t have.
Ellen’s Child, and Powell’s
‘Walter Flory’ is a cross between Crinum ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ and Crinum × powellii ‘Album’. Both Plant Delights and my own beds say the same thing, and you can see it in the plant.
Look at the photo of the two of them together. There’s the deeper pink of ‘Ellen Bosanquet’, and there’s the lighter — but still bright — pink of ‘Walter Flory’, with the dark striping showing off against it. The Walter Flory blooms are also more open. It bloomed in June and July alongside Ellen, because it inherited Ellen’s timing along with Ellen’s color.
The other parent is doing quieter work. Crinum × powellii ‘Album’ is one of the most cold-hardy crinums there is, and it passed that down. This bulb will do well in zone 7, though it loves the heat of zones 8 through 10. That combination — Ellen’s flower, Powell’s constitution — is the reason to grow it.
The Man It’s Named For, and the Woman Who Named It
These are two different people and it’s worth keeping them straight, because the plant gets described in ways that blur them together.
Walter S. Flory (1907–1998) did not make this crinum. He’s the man it honors. Flory was a botanist and geneticist — he took his PhD at the University of Virginia in 1931, and from 1936 to 1944 he worked as a horticulturist for the Texas Experiment Station, breeding crops for southern climates. That’s where the thing that mattered happened: in Texas, in those eight years, Flory picked up what became a lifelong passion for the Amaryllis family, the family this plant belongs to. He went on to direct the Blandy Experimental Farm in Virginia, and in 1963 took the Babcock Chair of Botany at Wake Forest. He made his first botanizing trip to Mexico in 1952 and kept going back, working both sides of the Texas–Mexico border for decades. If you grow amaryllids at all, some of what’s known about them is known because of him.
Kitty Clint made and named it. Katherine Clint was a plantswoman and nursery owner in Brownsville, Texas — right on that border Flory kept driving. Plant Delights, who knew both of them, put it plainly: the crinum was named and introduced by Flory’s good friend, Kitty Clint. She did the crossing. She did the naming. She named it for her friend.
So the honest sentence is: a nurserywoman in Brownsville crossed two crinums and put her friend the cytologist’s name on the result. Flory’s contribution to this particular plant was being worth naming something after. That’s not nothing — it’s most of what a name is for — but it isn’t breeding, and I’d rather not let the page imply otherwise.
Brownsville is the far end of Texas, hard against the river. My own copy says the bulb was crossed and developed there and so it can absolutely stand the heat, and that’s fair — a plant selected in Brownsville has been asked a serious question about summer.
Uses in the Landscape
Front and center. You can plant this in full southern sun as a centerpiece and it will hold the position.
The foliage argument is the real one. A lot of crinums are worth growing for six weeks and tolerable for the rest of the year. This one has excellent lush green foliage that looks like something the whole season, so it works as a structural plant that happens to bloom rather than a bloom that drags a plant around behind it.
Because it flowers with ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ and reads lighter, the two of them together are a better composition than either alone — same shape, same timing, two registers of pink, one of them striped. If you’ve got Ellen and you’re adding a second crinum, add this one.
Planting & Care
Depth: Plant with the neck sticking out. Look at the diagram and copy it.
Sun: Eight hours or more of daylight.
Soil: Good garden soil, plenty of sun.
Zones: Zone 7 works, thanks to the powellii parent — but mulch over the top in a hard freeze. It’s happiest in 8 to 10.
Water: It tolerates drought very well. But it will perform better for you if you water it through the bloom period, and regularly during the hot dry months. Drought tolerance is about survival, not about flowers.
Multiplying: Offsets, mostly. It can be grown from seed as well.
The first year: Crinums don’t like to be moved, so it won’t bloom for you this season. Give it time to settle and take the display next year. Larger bulbs get to dividing sooner and are likelier to give you more and bigger blooms in the first year.
A Plant Between Two Friends
I like this one for a reason that has nothing to do with the flower.
Somewhere in the middle of the last century, a scientist spent eight years in Texas and came away with an obsession he carried for sixty more. A nursery owner in Brownsville, a few hundred miles down the road, was working the same plants for her own reasons. They knew each other. They were friends. And when she made something worth keeping, she put his name on it.
That is how nearly everything in this genus got its name. There’s no registry, no committee, no forms. There are people who cared about the same plants and thought well enough of each other to say so in the only permanent medium available to a gardener, which is a bulb that refuses to die.
Flory has been gone since 1998. Kitty Clint’s gone too. The crinum is fifteen dollars and it will still be blooming in Texas when everybody reading this page is also gone. I’d call that a fair result for a friendship.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com