Manettia cordifolia (glabra)

The firecracker vine earns the name in high summer, when a delicate twining stem lights up with a long, generous run of small, scarlet, tubular flowers. Manettia cordifolia is the true red-flowered species, all crimson with no yellow tip, quieter in vigor than the candy-corn firecracker vines of the houseplant trade, and the better-mannered for that, climbing just enough to be useful without ever becoming a thug.

A South American native, ranging from Brazil and Argentina through Paraguay and beyond, this member of the coffee family, Rubiaceae, honors Saverio Manetti, the eighteenth-century Italian physician who ran the botanic garden in Florence. The epithet cordifolia means heart-leaved, though the foliage on garden plants often reads narrower than that suggests, and the older name Manettia glabra, sometimes seen in parentheses, is simply a synonym for the same species. Woodlanders has grown this vine for a long while: the original start came from Edmund Cuthbert of Summerville, South Carolina, before 1980, and the line has been kept going ever since.

Red and tubular, the flowers are built for hummingbirds, and they find the vine reliably through the warm months. Give Manettia cordifolia a sunny spot with moist but well-drained soil and a fence, trellis, or arbor to twine through, and the plant flowers for months on end. In the colder part of the range the vine dies back to the root with frost and returns in spring; farther north, grow the plant in a container that can shelter indoors over winter.

For all the fireworks in the name, this is a refined and restrained vine, ideal where a heavier tropical climber would swamp a small support: a mailbox post, an obelisk in a border, a patio container with a small tuteur, or a light trellis by a door where the hummingbirds can be watched at work. Grow this one for the long scarlet summer, for the hummingbirds that come to the flowers, and for a quiet piece of South Carolina garden history handed down from Edmund Cuthbert.