A jolt of the familiar! How nice to see a familiar garden flower growing in a protected forest, I thought at first. Then a second thought, is it an escapee from a garden? Could this be the beginning of another invasion? Finally, a balance. Is it a native which I’ve wrongly thought of as a garden exotic? After some search I found that the wine and milk lily (Crinum latifolium) is a native of India, but grows widely in gardens across the world. Another blow to my knowledge of lilies followed. It may be called a lily, and grow from a bulb, but it is an amaryllis. My mother collected and grew many lilies, but I don’t think she ever suspected that this and the closely related spider lily (Crinum asiaticum) were interlopers. She gave me a bulb of C. latifolium which still has its own tub on our balcony from which it sends out a shoot every year without ever having flowered.
This wasn’t the only shoot in that patch of land in Kanha NP. I could see another shoot near its base, and the dead flowers around it were probably due to another which had withered. Bulbs planted in the ground often grow vegetatively by sending out new bulbs. Behind it, in the grass were a couple of other flowering shoots. In one the wine had faded to milk. I’ve seen this happening in a garden, so I wasn’t surprised. What did surprise me was that in the wild one of its pollinators is a fly. Again, I should have thought a little harder. The trumpet shaped flower (salverform in jargon) would require smaller pollinators like flies, beetles, or ants, rather than large showy butterflies.
The genus Crinum is pantropical. From an origin in present day South Africa it spread across the world in two migrations, one to north Africa and Americas, another to India, Madagascar, and Australasia. This geographical spread must have then occurred when the continents were arranged differently. If you look at maps of the world around 250 million years ago you’ll see that was the last time that two such dispersals could produce relations of this kind. Northern Africa and the Americas were then one connected landmass. India, Madagascar and Australia were another contiguous area. These two landmasses were on opposite sides of southern Africa in the super-continent of Pangaea. So the origin of Crinum is likely to be in Pangaea, which means between 350 and 200 million years ago. The genus could be older than all dinosaurs! All this is a prelude to saying that the base form of Crinum is not like a lily at all, but the lily shape (salverform actinomorphic perianths in jargon) has evolved independently several times in the genus.
Don't hold your breath 