Friday Fabulous Flower - not so large, not what you think

Here's a tropical plant from Thailand and TPP knows what you are thinking.  What a cute little snapdragon!
Cute and little (about 5 mm long), yes, but not a snapdragon, although it was long so classified. Of course molecular data has resulted in the complete disintegration of the snapdragon family (Scrophulariaceae) to the point where TPP had to engage students in the massive effort to refile a dozens of genera in our herbarium, and now some things will prove hard to find without consulting a guide post or an alphabetized list of genera that will point you to the "correct" family.  At any rate, TPP found this plant growing in brick walls of old temples, basically weathered laterite clay. And both morphological and molecular data places this plant as the basal genus of the Orobanchaceae (broom-rape family), a family of parasitic and hemiparasitic plants.  All of the former Rhinanthoideae subfamily of hemiparasitic snapdragons got shifted to  the Orobanchs.  However, this genus is the only fully autotrophic plant in the family and it has the smallest seeds TPP has ever seen in this group, absolutely dust seed, smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. It grows in our glasshouse quite well.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Coral plant

Better late than never with the Friday Fabulous Flower; our internet service has been a bit flaky lately.  At any rate with the late summer flowering doldrums upon us, and so many plants damaged or dormant or just toasted because of the heat and drought, a quick peak into our glasshouse revealed a plant that really likes the heat, coral plant (Russelia equisetiformis).  This common name probably comes from the coral pink flower color of many common varieties.  The specific epithet means "form like Equisetum" or horsetails.  The resemblence isn't obvious to me, but the drooping stems of the subshrub (shrubby but not really woody) are nearly leafless and those that do occur are in whorls.  That must be it; reduced leaves in whorls.  Some time back Russelia was in the snapdragon family (Scrophulariaceae), but that family has been fragmented and combined with other families on the basis of molecular studies, so now this genus is in the Plantaginaceae, the plantain family (not the banana kind, but the lawn weed kind).  This sort of surprises people because the plantains have non-showy flowers and therefore showing little obvious simliarities to bird pollinated flowers like this genus.  As a hummingbird plant, these flowers do not show the bilateral symmetry typical of many of the insect pollinated flowers associated with snapdragons.  These plants find a lot of landscape use in the tropics and subtropics because they are pretty tough and droop attractively from planters and raised beds.