Crinum americanum

Crinum americanum is the swamp lily of the southeastern coastal plain, a bulb throwing broad strap-shaped leaves two to three feet long in a loose arching rosette, with scapes of about the same height carrying two to six flowers in a terminal umbel. The flowers are the whole event: glistening white, six narrow tepals recurved into a star five or six inches across, the long filaments tipped with dark anthers and often flushed rose-pink toward the base. Fragrance arrives after dark, sweet and carrying, which tells you plainly what does the pollinating. Bloom comes in waves from late spring into autumn, and nearly year-round in frost-free gardens.

Crinum is simply the Greek krinon, lily, and americanum places the species, which grows wild in swamps, marshes, wet hammocks, and stream margins from South Carolina through Florida and west along the Gulf to Texas, with populations in Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and Mexico. String lily and seven sisters are the older vernacular names, the second counting the flowers in a generous umbel. One honest note carried forward from our earlier catalogs: plants offered under this name may in fact be Crinum erubescens from South America. Scott Ogden observed in Southern Bulbs that this very similar species is the better adapted of the two to ordinary garden conditions, forming colonies and flowering well in soil that is merely moist rather than genuinely wet.

The Amaryllidaceae are a chemically serious family and Crinum is no exception. More than a hundred and seventy alkaloids have been described across the genus, and analysis of C. americanum alone has turned up crinine, lycorine, caranine, hippadine, and crinamine among others. The ethnopharmacological record for the species points to preparations used for asthma and bronchitis, for malaria, and as expectorant, antiemetic, and cardiotonic remedies. Those same alkaloids make every part of the plant, and the bulb above all, toxic to people, dogs, cats, and horses.

Give swamp lily what the wild colonies take: full sun to light shade, rich soil, and as much water as you can manage. Plants thrive at pond margins, along ditches, in rain gardens, and in containers standing in a saucer of water, though they will also grow perfectly well in an ordinary moist border with regular irrigation. Set the neck of the bulb at or just above soil level. Foliage dies back over winter at the cold edge of the range and returns readily from the bulb; in zone ten the leaves simply carry on. Pair with Hymenocallis, Iris virginica, Thalia dealbata, and Zephyranthes for a wet planting that flowers from spring to frost, and site near a porch or an evening path so the night fragrance actually gets used.