Monday, July 13, 2009

Another shrimp in the bucket

Just after writing about my shrimp plant collection, I ran across another shrimp plant that I had to have. :)

The purple shrimp plant (Justicia scheidweileri) goes by many different common names, including Rose Pine, South African Acanthus, Jade Magic and Maracas Brazilian Fireworks.  Mine was labeled with only the last common name and no genus and species names.  But I remembered that it was in the Justicia genus from my research last week when I wrote about shrimp plants.  My collection now contains five plants from the Justicia genus and one from the Pachystachys genus.

purple
Purple shrimp plant (Justicia scheidweileri)
This plant is very cool, with deep purple sheaths for the long magenta blooms.  In addition to the vibrant blooms, this plant has cool leaves.  There is a prominent silver stripe going down the center vein of each leaf and fainter silver stripes highlighting several other veins on the leaves.  It is not as prevalent in my picture, but you can see some more here.

1 comment:

  1. Hi, just letting you name that the correct name for your purple shrimp plant is Porphyrocoma pohliana. BTW, it self-seeds readily and is a lovely little thing :-)

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