Description:

• Deciduous or evergreen bulbous herbs
• Bulb 20-220 mm in diameter; sometimes splitting to form clumps; outer tunics tough, coriaceous, producing extensible threads when torn
• Leaves perennial, 4-many, present during flowering, with or without a thickened midrib; sheathing bases often forming a false stem; margins sometimes undulate, hyaline, ± fringed with short, branched cilia; apex of mature leaves often truncate
• Inflorescence a 1-25-flowered cluster, up to 300 mm in diameter; scape compressed, solid, fleshy, 30-700 mm or more long, reclining in fruit; spathe valves 2, narrowly to broadly lanceolate, membranous
• Flowers showy, irregular, often weakly so by deflection of style, hypocrateriform to trumpet-shaped, pale to deep pink or white, often with deep pink keels; pedicels spreading, much shorter than perigone
• Tepals connate into a long, narrow, cylindric tube, often curved; segments linear to broadly lanceolate, reflexed or ± spreading and recurved towards apex, equalling to shorter than tube
• Stamens arising from perigone throat, arcuate and spreading or declinate, equal or unequal; filaments filiform, free at base; anthers dorsifixed, versatile, curved; pollen bisulculate with spinulose exine
• Ovary ellipsoid; ovules ± 12 per locule, becoming ategmic; style declinate, filiform, exserted; stigma obscurely 3-lobed
• Fruit indehiscent, subglobose, membranous or occasionally somewhat fleshy, sometimes beaked, opening irregularly
• Seeds subglobose, 20-30 mm in diameter, with a thin corky covering, occasionally papillose; outer layers of endosperm green; embryo green
• x = 11

Nomenclature:

• Crinum L.
  • Linnaeus: 291 (1753)
  • Baker: 198 (1896)
  • Sölch & Roessler: 4 (1969)
  • Verdoorn: 27 (1973)
  • Nordal: 9 (1982)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 65, pantropical; ± 40 species in sub-Saharan Africa
• Southern Africa: Species ± 20, widespread in all countries and provinces of the summer-rainfall region; only 1 species in Namaqualand (Northern Cape) and the Western Cape; common in vleis, salt pans, streams and grassland