Five Bulbs and Some Time
There are many rain lilies that bloom all across the world, but few put on the show of Habranthus robustus. This pink rain lily will bloom 4 to 6 times in one summer, not minding the heat or humidity. They can be seen performing in shady areas and in full sun. These larger rain lily bulbs quickly clump and spread, offering a showy display in an otherwise dormant summer garden. The light pink showy displays make great borders often seen from afar.
This is the same plant we sell in pots, sold the old way: five dry bulbs, ten dollars. That’s a different bargain and you should go in knowing it. The pots give you a stand this year. The bulbs give you a colony for the price of a sandwich, if you’re willing to wait for it. Bulb people have been making that trade for a very long time, and it’s usually the right one.
A Bulb That Refuses to Stay Put
Habranthus robustus is native to South America — Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. William Herbert described it in 1829. Herbert was an English clergyman who happened to be the great amaryllis authority of his century; he’s the same man who gave us the genus name Zephyranthes, from Zephyr, the Greek god of the west wind, and anthos, flower. You’ll also see this plant written as Zephyranthes robusta — the taxonomists have moved it back and forth, and both names point at the same lily.
What happened after Herbert is the good part. Shipped around the globe as a garden ornamental, this bulb naturalized nearly everywhere warm it landed: the southern United States, Mauritius, South Africa, Colombia. It got out of the beds and into the countryside.
That’s the same instinct that makes it a five-dollar-bill kind of plant in your own yard. The bulbs are remarkably long-lived — colonies in old cemeteries and homesites have been documented persisting 80+ years with no care whatsoever. Nobody has been out there dividing them or feeding them. They’ve just been there, blooming after storms, since before anyone alive remembers.
Zephyranthes vs. Habranthus
Worth learning, because it’s how you’ll identify what you find in the field.
Zephyranthes holds its flower upright and radially symmetric — you look down into a star. Its stamens come in two lengths and spread out.
Habranthus holds its flower tilted, leaning to one side on a declinate stem, and the flower isn’t symmetric. The filaments are fasciculate — bunched together — in four distinct lengths, all of them longer than the flower tube, curving as they run out. That four-length bundle is the diagnostic; nothing in Zephyranthes does it.
Put simply: our grandiflora looks at the sky. This one looks at you.
Getting Dry Bulbs Established
Here’s the part the pots page doesn’t need and this one does.
Plant them soon. These are small bulbs, and small bulbs don’t have much reserve to sit around on. Feel each one as you plant — if it’s firm, it’s healthy and it will grow.
Plant them shallow. An inch or two of soil over the top. These are not tulips. Small bulbs don’t need to go far down.
Plant them together. Don’t space five bulbs evenly across a bed. Put two or three in a hole. A rain lily’s entire effect depends on many flowers opening at once — every bulb in a colony responds to the same rain trigger at the same time, which is why an established patch throws dozens of blooms in a few days and a lonely bulb throws one you’ll walk right past.
Expect a quiet first year. Perennial bulbs take a while to establish, and dry bulbs may take an extra year to bloom. Don’t be anxious if all you see is greenery. Foliage means the bulb is taking in nutrients, growing, and probably multiplying. It takes a lot of energy to make a flower, and the more the bulb banks this season, the better next season looks. We always plant with next year in mind.
Then leave them alone. Weed around them once in a while. That’s the maintenance.
Let the Seed Do the Rest
This is how five bulbs becomes a drift, and it’s the real reason to buy them this way.
Every May and June the Habranthus pink rain lilies really take off, and when they’re finished blooming, large seed pods form. Each pod is filled with lots of papery seeds — we don’t count them, there are too many. Scatter them directly where you want more bulbs, scratch them into the soil, and you’ll often see growth in a couple of years. Or do nothing at all and let the colony self-sow on its own. Don’t worry, they aren’t considered invasive and can be easily removed if needed.
Collecting these seeds led to one of my first dates with my wife. If you’re the Bulb Hunter, you ask your girl to put on her blue jeans and go collect rain lily seeds with you. That’s what Rebecca and I did on one of our first dates many years ago. I wish the weather had been nicer — it was blistering hot — but she must have had a good time, because that was just the beginning of our exciting journey. That heat speaks to another quality of the flower: they’ll bloom even during our hottest summer months.
Where to Put Them
These are extremely resilient, and even though the blooms are large, the bulbs are fairly small. Which means you can put them where nothing else will go: in cracks in pavement and brickwork with a little soil; in that strip between the sidewalk and the driveway that bakes all summer; under live oaks and pecans around the dripline where most bulbs hate competing with big roots; in cemeteries and other places with no irrigation; around mailboxes and lamp posts where you want something alive; and in containers and on porches, where they’re excellent.
Zones: 7b–10 in the ground. Colder, grow them in pots and move them under cover for winter.
Alongside the Other Pinks
People ask why anyone needs more than one pink rain lily. Because they’re three different plants on three different clocks.
The H. robustus is the tall one — 10–14 inches — with paler, flatter foliage, a trumpet-shaped elongated bloom, and the palest, softest pink of the three. It starts first, in April/May. The Zephyranthes grandiflora and Z. ‘Labuffarosa’ are shorter and open star-like, and start the first of June. The bloom times overlap for several weeks at the end of May and into June.
Planted together, the three give you a lovely gradient of pink — deepening from the palest blush of the robustus, through the gentle rose of the labuffarosa, to the rich, almost iridescent bloom of the grandiflora. Which is a fine argument for buying the cheap bulbs. Get all three.
Shop this variety at SouthernBulbs.com
Shop Pink Rain Lily — 5 Bulbs (Habranthus robustus) →
Starting at $10.00