Crinum americanumL.

Florida Swamp Lilyseven sisters

WFO wfo-0000764381 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Crinum americanum, photographed by Arthur Windsor
fig. a Arthur Windsor, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-02 / obs. 195676178

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
992850
Filed as
Crinum americanum L.
Det. by
A. J. Urquiola 2000-01-01
Collected
N. L. Britton 1918-12-27
Origin
PR
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 13 botanical countries

Regions where Crinum americanum is native: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mexico Central, Mexico Gulf, Mexico Southeast, Mexico Southwest, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Cayman Is., Jamaica AlabamaFloridaGeorgiaLouisianaMexico CentralMexico GulfMexico SoutheastMexico SouthwestMississippiSouth CarolinaTexasJamaica Cayman Is.
Native distribution of Crinum americanum, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Florida FLA
Georgia GEO
Louisiana LOU
Mexico Central MXC
Mexico Gulf MXG
Mexico Southeast MXT
Mexico Southwest MXS
Mississippi MSI
South Carolina SCA
Texas TEX
Cayman Is. CAY SOUTHERN AMERICA
Jamaica JAM

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 267 in flower of 282 examined

Proportion of examined Crinum americanum in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 23 25 92% 75% to 98%
Feb 22 24 92% 74% to 98%
Mar 9 9 100% 70% to 100%
Apr 19 19 100% 83% to 100%
May 19 22 86% 67% to 95%
Jun 38 39 97% 87% to 100%
Jul 27 27 100% 88% to 100%
Aug 15 16 94% 72% to 99%
Sep 13 14 93% 69% to 99%
Oct 17 18 94% 74% to 99%
Nov 29 31 94% 79% to 98%
Dec 36 38 95% 83% to 99%

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Crinum americanum observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 267 of 282 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,989 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 7.7 °C 14.3 °C 17.1 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 29.7 °C 31.2 °C 32.6 °C
Annual rainfall 1,275 mm 1,468 mm 1,708 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 132 mm 165 mm 336 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,989 research-grade observations of Crinum americanum that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 15 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Bulbine uncinata Moench
  • Crinum americanum var. americanum
  • Crinum americanum var. traubii (Moldenke) L.S.Hannibal
  • Crinum caribaeum Baker
  • Crinum ceruleum Raf.
  • Crinum commelyni DC.
  • Crinum conicum M.Roem.
  • Crinum floridanum Griseb.
  • Crinum herbertianum Schult.f.
  • Crinum longiflorum Herb.
  • Crinum roozenianum O'Brien
  • Crinum strictum Herb.
  • Crinum strictum var. traubii Moldenke
  • Crinum texanum L.S.Hannibal
  • Scadianus multiflorus Raf.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.