{"product_id":"justicia-brandegeana-pink","title":"Justicia brandegeana 'Pink'","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe shrimp plant earns the name honestly. The arching flower spikes are built of overlapping bronze-to-pink bracts, each one curved and shingled over the next, so that the whole drooping cluster reads unmistakably as the tail of a boiled shrimp. This is the soft pink form, gentler in color than the coppery-salmon type most people picture, and out of the bracts slip the true flowers: slender, white, two-lipped tubes freckled with maroon at the throat.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJusticia sits in Acanthaceae and honors James Justice, the eighteenth-century Scot sometimes called the father of Scottish gardening, while the epithet remembers the American botanist Townshend Brandegee. Older books file the plant under Beloperone guttata, and you will still meet that name in nurseries and greenhouses; botanists have since folded Beloperone into the much larger genus Justicia. Gardeners also know the shrimp plant as false hop, since the drooping bracted spikes carry a passing resemblance to the strobiles of the brewer's vine.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNative to Mexico and reaching into Central America, this is a soft-stemmed tropical shrub that flowers with almost comic persistence, nearly year round where frost never comes and through the warm months everywhere else. In USDA zones 9 through 11 the plant stays evergreen and shrubby; in zone 8 the top freezes away and the roots push up fresh growth in spring. North of that, gardeners grow the shrimp plant in a pot, summering the pot outdoors and bringing the plant under cover before the cold. A light pinch now and then keeps a plant from growing lanky and shy of bloom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHummingbirds find the white tubes quickly, and butterflies work the spikes alongside them, which makes the shrimp plant a small engine of movement in a container or a warm border. There is a quieter history here too: the Huastec Maya of northeastern Mexico kept the plant in their medicine, using the leaves for dysentery and other complaints of the gut and to dress wounds. For most of us the reward is simpler and entirely visible, a tireless, shrimp-pink performance that asks for little more than a bright spot and the occasional trim.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057904226419,"sku":"JUST-BRAN-PINK-01G","price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/2FDB5FAD-D0B7-4AC0-81DA-AF79F59CCA79.jpg?v=1727115139","url":"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/products\/justicia-brandegeana-pink","provider":"Woodlanders","version":"1.0","type":"link"}