Question

Which plant is described by these clues? The genus honours a sixteenth-century German physician and herbalist counted among the founding fathers of botany. Every whorl of the flower runs in fours — four outer segments, four inner, eight {stamens} in two ranks — and the {stigma} is divided into four lobes. The seed vessel is fused into the stalk below the flower, so the withered bloom drops away from the top of a swelling that is already the young fruit. Its four outer segments are as brightly coloured as any petal, flare backwards on opening, and run to twice the length of the four true petals they uncover. The {ovary} ripens into a soft, juicy, many-seeded {berry} rather than a dry pod that splits along seams. Leaves are set three or four to a joint around the stem, each 1 to 2.5 inches (2.5 to 6 cm) long, finely toothed and carried on a reddish stalk. The coloured tube below the flaring segments is a short cylinder only about half an inch (10 to 13 mm) long, while the {stamens} and style hang well past the mouth of the flower. It grows wild down the temperate south of Chile and Argentina as far as the Strait of Magellan, and is by a wide margin the hardiest species of its genus in cultivation. Escaped from gardens, it has become the standard field hedge of the far west of Ireland and is recorded as naturalised in parts of Australia and New Zealand. Its epithet points to the southernmost strait of South America, and the dangling scarlet-and-violet lanterns of this genus lent their name to both a synthetic dye and the colour it gave.

Accepted Answer

Fuchsia magellanica

Name That Plant #055