Description
The name for this plant is very confused both in literature and on websites. It may clarify matters if I start by saying that our stock is authentic material, nursery-propagated (by both division and seed) from a personal collection made by Antoine Hoog, near Sana’a in Yemen in 1997. It is true and correct to name and location.
The species is spread throughout the Arabian peninsula, usually growing in damp spots amongst rocks, in places where it can get some seasonal water. It has large, open white flowers, which develop a suffusion of palest pink in time. The flowers have the shape and appearance of clustered Amaryllis and are really lovely. In addition they are beautifully evening-fragrant, a characteristic of moth-pollinated species.
Despite what you may think of as its southerly wild range, the plant has proven to be very close to hardy, surviving with a minimum of protection in an unheated tunnel house. A fertile loam, dryish in winter but with abundant water and feed when it is in full growth. Large seeds follow the flowers (and the plant is seemingly self-fertile) and depending on the numbers set within each seed head, these seeds can be from 2cm to 10cm each in diameter (do please read that seed size again, it is correct)!
Now onto the naming problems: The plant has been confused in horticulture by the wrong naming of a Luthur Burbank hybrid which was distributed as Crinum album. Unfortunately the name album was already in use botanically and it is a synonym of C. yemense. However the hybrid is NOT yemense. The “album” name of the hybrid was then changed, by some growers, to that of the species yemense. In fact the name was wrong in the first place, as this hybrid plant was never the same as album or the species C. yemense. This misuse by growers has just served to muddle the naming in horticulture, badly and for once botanists were not to blame.
Further checking the name in the literature also suggests that not only is true C. yemense the same plant as C. album of (Forssk.) Herb. but it should possibly even be called that in fact, but doing that opens yet another can of worms since by now plants labelled as C. album in horticulture, and literature, are probably the Luther Burbank hybrid anyway.
This is, for once, actually down to horticulturalists and not to botanists but lest I put you off, I will ignore any further naming complications and reiterate that ours is genuine material, true to the original concept of C. yemense, it is directly traceable to Yemen and it has a documented history of just two growers, the original collector in 1997 and ourselves!
Introduced to our list December 2018.
