Pachystachys spicata

42.14710999, -87.7898941

42.14719391, -87.78972626

Cardinal's Guard

Cardinal's guard (Pachystachys spicata) a member of the Acanthaceae family, is native to South America and the greater Caribbean. This ornamental tropical plant bears large clusters of brilliant red flowers along an erect terminal spike with overlapping green leaf-like bracts. The flower clusters are composed of 2-inch tubes with two central lobes at right angles and two protruding stamens. Its dark green, glossy, oval leaves have prominent veins and grow to 12 inches. The shrub will reach 6 feet in height and grows best in a sunny location in fertile, sandy, loamy, well-drained, moderately moist soil, where hummingbirds love to feed at its tubular blossoms. The name was validly published by Hipรณlito Ruiz Lรณpez and Josรฉ Antonio Pavon, but it was not until 1986 that Dieter Carl Wasshausen reclassified it into today's valid botanical systematics.

โ€˜์ถ”๊ธฐ๊ฒฝ์˜ ๋ณด์ดˆโ€™๋ผ๊ณ  ๋ถˆ๋ฆฌ๋Š” ํŒŒํ‚ค์Šคํƒ€ํ‚ค์Šค ์Šคํ”ผ์นดํƒ€๋Š” ์ฅ๊ผฌ๋ฆฌ๋ง์ดˆ๊ณผ์˜ ์‹๋ฌผ๋กœ ๋‚จ์•„๋ฉ”๋ฆฌ์นด์™€ ์นดv๋ฆฌ๋น„์•ˆํ•ด๊ฐ€ ์›์‚ฐ์ง€์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด ์‹๋ฌผ์€ ์žฅ์‹์šฉ์˜ ์—ด๋Œ€ ์‹๋ฌผ๋กœ ์žŽ๊ฐ™์€ ํฌ์—ฝ์ด ๊ฒน์ณ์„œ ๋‚˜๊ณ , ๊ทธ์œ„๋กœ ์šฐ๋š์†Ÿ์€ ์ˆ˜์ƒ ๊ฝƒ์ฐจ๋ก€ ๋‘˜๋ ˆ์— ํ™”๋ คํ•œ ๋นจ๊ฐ„ ๊ฝƒ๋ฌด๋ฆฌ๋ฅผ ํ”ผ์›๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ฝƒ๋ฌด๋ฆฌ๋Š” 2์ธ์น˜ ๊ธธ์ด์˜ ๋Œ€๋กฑ๊ณผ v์ค‘์•™์˜ ์ง๊ฐ์œผ๋กœ๋‚œ ๋‘๊ฐœ์˜ ๋กœ๋ธŒ, ๋‘๊ฐœ์˜ ํŠ€์–ด๋‚˜์˜จ ์ˆ˜์ˆ ๋กœ ์ด๋ฃจ์–ด ์กŒ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์žŽ์€ ์ง„๋…น์ƒ‰์ด๊ณ , ๋ฐ˜๋“ค ๋ฐ˜๋“คํ•˜๊ณ , ํƒ€์›ํ–ฅ์ธ๋ฐ, ๋ˆˆ์— ๋„๋Š” ์žŽ๋งฅ์ด ์žˆ๊ณ , 12์ธ์น˜๊นŒ์ง€ ์ž๋ž๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด ๊ด€๋ชฉ์€ 6ํ”ผํŠธ์˜ ํฌ๊ธฐ๋กœ ์ž๋ผ๊ณ , ํ•ด๊ฐ€ ์ž˜ ๋“œ๋Š” ์œ„์น˜์—, ์–‘๋ถ„๊ณผ ๋ชจ๋ž˜๊ฐ€ ๋งŽ์€, ์–‘ํ† ์งˆ์—, ๋ฌผ์ด ์ž˜๋น ์ง€๋Š”, ์ ๋‹นํžˆ ์ˆ˜๋ถ„์ด ์žˆ๋Š” ํ† ์–‘์—์„œ ์ž˜ ์ž๋ž๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋ฒŒ์ƒˆ๋“ค์ด ๊ฝƒ๋Œ€๋กฑ์—์„œ ๊ฟ€์„ ๋จน๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์„ ์ข‹์•„ํ•  ๊ฒƒ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ด๋ฆ„์€ ์ดํด๋ฆฌํ†  ๋ฃจ์ด์ฆˆ ๋กœํŽ˜์ฆˆ์™€ ํ˜ธ์„ธ ์•ˆํ† ์ด์˜ค ํŒŒ๋ณธ์—์˜ ํ•ด ๋ฐœํ‘œ๋˜์—ˆ์ง€๋งŒ, 1986๋…„์—, ๋””์ดํ„ฐ ์นผ ๋ฐ”์Šคํ•˜์šฐ์  ์ด ํ˜„์žฌ์˜ ์›์˜ˆํ•™์ฒด๊ณ„์— ๋”ฐ๋ผ ๋‹ค์‹œ ๊ตฌ๋ถ„๋˜์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Soil:
Moist
Plant Shape:
Upright
Exposure:
Full Sun
Partial Shade
Bloom Time:
January - February
March - April
November - December
Bloom Color:
Red
Landscape Use:
Bedding or Border
Specimen Plant
Wildlife Interest:
Attracts Birds
Attracts Butterflies
Plant Type:
Shrub
Hardiness Zone:
10 - 11