Despite the hot night temps and a couple of days at 100F it is still blooming and looking very good. I haven't even fertilized it which I really need to do, it might do even a little better than it's doing now. The 'Cascading Angel's Earrings' doesn't have as big of flowers as this one either. I'm really amazed.

I guess you'd have to be in my shoes to see the damage-yes, damage-done by this obsession with prairies as "the" native vegetation, all while forests continue to be converted to parking lots and car washes ad nauseum. It's well beyond the time I've got right now-I'm smack in the middle of doing data gathering for Wetland Mitigation Monitoring Reports for our DNR and the Army Corps of Engineers-in sites which are prairie plantings no less, to fully flesh this out. I've taken shots at it here and there on the various native-oriented forums here on GW. We're talking highly nuanced, but most people just want to receive a very simple message that if they cut down the blue spruce and plant some Rudbeckias in their yards, they've done great things for nature. I dare say, I think you'd be surprised if you knew the full extent of my personal and professional involvement in this area. And BTW, as vegetation manager for our many Stormwater utility sites and projects, I am directly involved in the installation and maintenance of prairie plantings.....not restorations...but which I do in fact view as little oases of habitat for those organisms which do best there. However, due to our location right in the middle of said tension zone, I've devoted considerable effort to educating my associates as to just exactly what vegetation communities are truly native here. We've therefore expanded the total plant palette we use at such sites. You'd be extremely hard-pressed to convince me this has not been an important and positive contribution. What has happened, again due to what I call the prairie lobby, is that because the basic methodology of prairie formation/maintenance is that these were pyric plant communities, now everyone thinks all the land around here burned every three years, or some equivalent bit of nonsense. In fact, the county I live in was originally covered by primarily northern hardwood forest, which indeed does burn sometimes, but research has shown the fire interval to be roughly 400 years! I decry the simple-minded way that so many avowed native enthusiasts view plant community management, due to the unwarranted intrusion of this kind of thinking into every corner of the discipline. Pyric plant communities are great, they did exist in this state, but they are far, far from the whole story. And this unwarranted simplification does a disservice to nature at large. I've literally been standing in the middle of one of our created prairies with one of the big guys, the acknowledged experts, in the field of native restoration, as they wondered if this strain of big bluestem, or that patch of switchgrass, was genetically appropriate for our locale,while during the whole time, an adjacent tract of forest was being torn down for more houses....with not a word or so much as a thought given to the utterly wanton destruction going on next door, so to speak. This rubs me the wrong way, to say the very least. +oM

I found the name: Pearcea hypocyrtiflora Here's a link with more pictures: http://www.gesneriads.ca/pearcea.htm This diminutive rhizomatous plant has very attractive and colorful foliage, as well as unusual brilliantly red flowers. The lobes of the flowers do not open except under optimum conditions. The flowers are probably hummingbird pollinated. They grow in colonies in tropical rain forests. Thanks, Joe Here is a link that might be useful: More info and pictures about this plant

Finally tracked this down: a Pedilanthus, probably P. palmeri. See link below. It was obvious it was something in the Euphorbiaceae, with a stalked, 3-celled ovary like that, and the bracts and inflorescence structure suggested Euphorbia and its close allies (subfam. Euphorbioideae tribe Euphorbieae). Here is a link that might be useful: Pedilanthus