Plant Highlight · Justicia brandegeeana · Mexico to the Gulf South

Everything You Are Looking At Is a Leaf

The shrimp plant is one of the most recognizable shrubs in the warm South, and almost nobody who grows one has ever really looked at the flower.

9 min read · By Fiona von Grey · Aiken, South Carolina

I.The shrimp, and the anatomy of the joke

A shrimp plant in good form carries arching, drooping spikes six inches long, built of overlapping bracts shingled one over the next in coppery salmon, rust, or bronze. Each spike curls at the tip. The resemblance to a boiled shrimp is not a stretch or a marketing flourish; the resemblance is immediate and slightly absurd, and it is the reason a tropical Mexican shrub ended up on porches from Savannah to San Diego.

Here is the part that gets missed. None of that color is a petal. Every one of those overlapping scales is a modified leaf, a bract, and the bracts are what hold color for weeks at a stretch. The actual flowers are the small white tubes that slip out from between them, two-lipped, freckled with maroon in the throat, and gone in a day or two. A spike keeps producing them in sequence while the bracts stay put.

The practical effect is that Justicia brandegeeana appears to bloom continuously, which is not quite true and not quite false. The display is continuous. The flowering is a fast relay happening inside a long-lived frame. Once you know to look for the white tubes you start noticing how few are open at any moment, and the plant gets more interesting rather than less.

II.Justice, Brandegee, and the name that moved

The genus honors James Justice, an eighteenth-century Scottish horticulturist sometimes called the father of Scottish gardening, a Court of Session clerk who spent rather more of his fortune on hothouses and bulbs than was strictly prudent and who is credited with flowering the first pineapple in Scotland. The epithet remembers Townshend Stith Brandegee, the American botanist who, with his wife Katharine, did much of the foundational collecting on the flora of Baja California and the Mexican northwest.

If you learned this plant a few decades ago, you learned a different name. Older books and a good many nursery tags still file the shrimp plant under Beloperone guttata, and you will meet that name in greenhouses to this day. Botanists have since folded Beloperone into the much larger genus Justicia, which now runs to something like six hundred species worldwide and is one of the big genera of the acanthus family. The old name is not wrong so much as superseded, and it remains useful for finding the plant in an out-of-print book.

There is a third name worth knowing, because gardeners use it and it explains something. False hop. The drooping, bracted, shingled spike does look a great deal like the strobile of a hop vine, and the comparison is more botanically informative than the shrimp one, since a hop strobile is also a structure of overlapping bracts doing the visual work that petals usually do.

III.Zone 8 and the honest answer about winter

This is where most online advice goes soft, so let us be plain. Justicia brandegeeana is reliably evergreen and shrubby in USDA zones 9 through 11. In zone 8, which includes Aiken, the top growth freezes away in a normal winter and the roots push fresh growth in spring, given decent drainage and a mulch. That is a genuinely different plant in the garden: not a four-foot evergreen shrub but a herbaceous thing that starts from the ground in April and reaches perhaps two to three feet by the time the bracts come on.

Root hardiness in zone 8 is not a guarantee. A wet winter, a plant sited in heavy soil, or an unusual cold snap after a warm December will take one out. The plants that come back are almost always the ones with sharp drainage and a hand's depth of mulch over the crown.

North of zone 8, grow the shrimp plant in a pot. Summer the pot outdoors in bright shade, bring the plant into a cool bright room or a greenhouse before frost, cut back hard, water sparingly through the dark months, and start feeding again when the light returns. Shrimp plants are undemanding houseplants by tropical standards and will flower indoors in a bright window.

IV.The hummingbird economy

A long white tube, held horizontally, presented at hovering height, produced in a continuous relay over months: this is a hummingbird flower, and the birds find one quickly. In the Gulf South a potted shrimp plant on a terrace is reliable ruby-throat traffic from summer into the fall migration, which in our part of South Carolina runs through September and into early October.

The timing is the useful part. A great deal of the Southern garden has finished by the time the ruby-throats are moving south and fattening for the Gulf crossing, and a plant that is still producing nectar tubes in late September is doing real work. Butterflies work the spikes alongside the birds, though they are the secondary customer here.

If you are building a late-season nectar sequence, the shrimp plant pairs naturally with the other tubular reds we grow. We wrote about the most stubborn of them in The Hibiscus That Never Opens, on Malvaviscus arboreus, a plant that solves the same problem from an entirely different family and never bothers to unfurl at all.

V.The rest of the genus, including one of ours

Six hundred species is a lot of genus, and a handful are worth a Southern garden. Two are in our propagation houses or our catalog now, and one grows wild in the rivers an hour from the nursery.

The native cousin

Justicia americana, American water willow, is a Southeastern native and about as far from a porch tropical as a congener can get. The plant colonizes gravel bars and rocky shallows in moving water from Ontario and Quebec south to Florida and west to Texas, spreading by rhizome into dense stands that hold a streambank together and shelter young fish. The flowers are small, white, and orchid-like, marked with violet, and they look nothing like a shrimp.

We do not currently offer water willow, and the plant is genuinely difficult in a garden unless you have moving water or a pond edge you are willing to let one colonize. But knowing the species exists changes how you see the shrimp plant on the terrace. The same genus is out there holding down a creek in the Piedmont, doing unglamorous ecological work, while the Mexican cousin gets admired for looking like seafood.

VI.Growing, pinching, and the leggy problem

A neglected shrimp plant goes lanky. Long bare stems, a tuft of bracts at each tip, and an increasingly apologetic silhouette. This is the plant's default behavior and the only real maintenance question worth discussing.

One honest caution, and a mild one: Justicia brandegeeana has naturalized in parts of Florida and along the Gulf, spreading locally where frost never arrives. In zone 8 and colder the winters handle the question for you. In zone 9b and warmer, keep an eye on where the plant is running, and do not turn one loose at a woodland edge.

For the broader case on siting tender tropicals where you will actually encounter them, rather than where they merely survive, see Plant the Gingers Where You Walk at Dusk. The same logic applies here, with the difference that the shrimp plant asks to be seen rather than smelled.