MYSTERY PLANT
When my daughter, Kate, was little, she used to bring me bouquets of fallen leaves that she gathered on her way home from school. Now, as a college student with a summer job in the City, she sometimes brings home interesting plants that she finds at the Union Square Greenmarket. Yesterday she brought me a mystery plant. She had no idea what it was and neither did the plant vendor’s helper from whom she bought it. She and I tackled the challenge of plant identification.
Our specimen tops out at thirty centimeters or just over a foot tall. I am sure the smallish nursery pot is only temporary, because the Mystery Plant’s configuration suggests that it will grow larger. The plant is shrubby, with the bottoms of the stalks remaining somewhat woody, while the tops are tender and green. A bit gangly in its growth habit, Mystery Plant has three main stalks with leaves running the entire length of each.
The leaves are elongated ovals, pointed at the ends, with smooth, rather than serrated or “toothed” edges. The largest and oldest of them are about two inches or five centimeters long. All are arranged in opposed pairs along the stems, which made me think that perhaps the plant is a member of the mint or Labiatae family. I rubbed the leaves. They had a course feel, somewhat akin to extremely fine sandpaper, but perhaps more important, they weren’t aromatic. Not all mints are aromatic, but many are, and a pronounced minty scent would have been a dead give away.
The flowers are the most interesting feature. Borne at the tops of the stalks, each flower is a tube, approximately one and a half inches long, ending in two prominent scarlet petals springing from a fuzzy purple center that looks like a tiny bat’s face. This sounds ugly, but it is rather cute and very distinctive.
I thought right away of a plant called Tacca chantrieri or black bat flower. I rushed to the catalogs and websites and found out that tacca is larger–in the wild, the flowers are up to a foot in diameter and either black or white. They do look like bat faces, but have a more sinister aspect. Tacca has three prominent petals rather than two and extremely long, whisker-like projections extending outward from the flowers’ centers.
Mystery Plant’s flowers reminded me of some sages that I have seen, so I changed my focus to the enormous salvia clan. In search of species with tubular, lipped flowers, I found Salvia coccinea and Salvia greggii. S. coccinea, also known as Texas or scarlet sage, seemed promising, especially when I found out that there was a bi-colored variety. Unfortunately that salvia was pink and white. Still, I thought maybe Mystery Plant was a new cultivar. I looked at many online and textbook photos of S. coccinea, but none of them showed the little bat faces that are so prominent on Mystery Plant.
More research ensued on Salvia greggii, also known as autumn salvia. The most obvious problem with the S. greggii idea was that the greggii’s bloom in the fall and my plant is blooming right now. Of course, it was probably raised in a greenhouse and forced into bloom, so that alone was not enough to knock S. greggii out of the running. After looking at anther dozen or so photos, I noticed that the greggii’s had smaller leaves and prominent, lower rather than upper, petals.
So I finally abandoned all the Latin and entered the terms “bat face” and “red and purple” in the online search engine. The first few citations referred to something called “bat-faced cuphea”. I clicked on one of the citations, which took me to a specialty website and there was Mystery Plant in living color, finally revealed as Cuphea llavea. My particular Mystery Plant is probably a cultivar called ‘Tiny Mice’, developed at the University of Georgia. Sometimes it is sold with nothing more than that name, so the buyer can only discover its genus and species by going on the Internet.
Cuphea is part of the loosestrife family, though in yet another bit of botanical confusion, it is not related to the common purple loosestrife, which is actually part of the primrose family. The llavea species is native to Mexico, confirming my suspicion that it will not survive cold temperatures. My ‘Tiny Mice’ will be installed in a larger pot, enjoy the summer and early fall outdoors and spend the winter in my sunny dining room. If you don’t have a sunny spot indoors or in a greenhouse, treat the plant as an annual.
Now the caveat”¦Cuphea is prone to root rot, aphids and powdery mildew. Fortunately you can protect your little mice or bats by providing them with good drainage and air circulation. Don’t over water and if you see aphids, give them a quick squirt with the hose. Fertilize once a month during the growing season or use a time-release fertilizer to ensure new growth and additional flowers.
I cannot find an online or mail order retail source for Cuphea ‘Tiny Mice’. Look for it in garden centers and other retail outlets. Logee’s Greenhouse has a flashier cultivar called ‘Flemenco Samba’. Find Logee’s at 141 North Street
Danielson, CT 06239; (888) 330-8038; www.logees.com. Free catalog.