Crinum

Flowgrow has written no description for Crinum calamistratum. What the page carries is a data sheet and a locality, and that is what this entry reports. The locality is narrow: West Cameroon, near Kumba. The plant is an onion type in the Amaryllidaceae, a bulb with a rosette of leaves, and it is the only plant in this batch that Flowgrow marks as unable to grow emersed.

The published conditions are undemanding. Optimum temperature is 23 to 26 °C, pH 5.5 to 8, carbonate hardness 2 to 12 dKH, light medium to high, with a tolerance band running from 12 up to 30. Flowgrow rates it easy and slow-growing and lists it for the background, the midground or use as a specimen plant. It is frequently available in the trade. Propagation is by splitting the plant and cutting off daughter plants, which is patient work with something this slow.

Two of the figures on this page are ours rather than Flowgrow's. The 50 cm height is editorial, because the source publishes no height row. The CO2 label sits at optional against a published range of 10 to 40 mg/l and no text to interpret. Whatever you may have read elsewhere about melt, algae on the older leaves or how deep the bulb should sit is absent from this source, so this entry does not repeat it.