Oddly formed flower in Burnley Gardens

This was a bugger of a plant to identify. Hard to get a handle on how that flower is constructed, with the six petals at the end of that long red tube looking like they were glued on by someone who knows nothing about floral structure.

As it turns out, it's a hybrid, with the petals coming from one parent and the tube from another. Sort of. The red tube might remind you of the Firecracker or Cigar Plant, Cuphea ignea, native to Mexico and West Indies. 'Ignea' is Latin for fire.

The hybrid flower is a little more flared at the far end than you might expect, but you see the distinctive colouring of the Firecracker Plant, red with white tip. The Firecracker Plant parent does in fact have petals, but two very small (purple-black) ones that are hardly noticeable.

That is a species widely grown in gardens, which is where it was sourced for one half of my photographed plant. The other parent, providing those distinctive '2+4' petals, was from a wild population of Cuphea angustifolia form Oxaca in Mexico.

Together they make Cuphea 'Starfire', or in this case, with presumably a little more manipulation, Cuphea 'Starfire Pink'.

The shrub is similar in shape and size to the Firecracker Plant and will flower pretty much all year. I photographed this in Burnley Gardens, in late April this year.

Cuphea is in the Lythraceae plant family, named after the genus of that common aquatic plant in southern Australia, Purple Loosestrife: Lythrum salicaria. The family also includes Crape Myrtle, Lagerstroemia.

There are some 250 species of Cuphea, so plenty to chose from when breeding for odd-looking flowers. They all come from Central and South America, where their seed is used as a source of oil. I'm presuming our hybrid doesn't set seed so has little value on this front. Just these seductive flowers.

One species has escaped from cultivation and become established in northern Australia, but again the hybrid origin should render Starfire Pink a safe selection for the garden.

This was just one of the plant gems uncovered in a walk through Burnley Gardens back in mid autumn. The other distractions included autumnal colour and the always majestic tree collection (including some towering, and old, kauri and oak).