Question

Which plant is described by these clues? The first half of its name honours an eighteenth-century Norwegian bishop who compiled his country's first flora between his church duties. The second half is Latin for long-sleeved, a nod to blades that hang like drapery from their stalks. Each minute flower is built in twos, a pair of hooded {petals} above a pair of thread-like {styles}, over an {ovary} sunk beneath them holding a single {ovule}. Sticky glands set between its leaf bases take a nitrogen-fixing blue-green {cyanobacterium} right inside the plant's living cells, an arrangement documented in no other flowering plant. A conical flowering head pushes straight out of the ground between the leaf stalks, seed-bearing flowers packed along its lower zone and pollen-bearing ones above, the lower ones ripening into small orange-red {drupes}. In the wild it grows only in the humid coastal ranges of southern Brazil, along stream banks and forest margins of the Serra do Mar. Stout reddish {prickles} run the entire length of leaf stalks up to 6.5 feet (2 m) long and continue out along the ribs on the underside of the blade. It demands ground that stays wet right through summer, and in colder gardens the frost-killed leaves are snapped down and folded over the crown as a winter blanket. A single kidney-shaped blade can span 4 to 6 feet (1.2 to 1.8 m), with a record specimen measured at 11 feet (3.4 m), the largest leaves of any hardy herbaceous plant grown in temperate gardens. A Victorian pondside status symbol in British gardens, it became a 2022 shock story when DNA testing showed that virtually every plant sold there under its name is really its hybrid with a Chilean cousin, now banned as an invasive.

Accepted Answer

Gunnera manicata

Name That Plant #048