About 10 days ago, a large yellow flower caught my eye on my morning walk. I’ve watched it every day, morning and evening, since, and I’m still amazed that this is a Central American indigenous plant - not something escaped from cultivation.
It was identified as a Costus species by a couple of good folks at Flickr. Being nutty about words, I started by tracking down the word Costus and found, in Dave’s Botanary, that is derived from the Sanskrit name Kushtha. Okay, so then I had to find out what Kushtha was. Turns out it’s a medicinal plant in a group of plants completely unrelated to the Costus group of plants. So, that’s peculiar and of no real help to me. Someday maybe I’ll find out why these flowers were named after other, unrelated plants.
I was, though, able to find out more about the Costus group, and in so doing, ran across David Skinner’s site, GingersRus. It turns out that Costus are closely related to gingers, sometimes being grouped in the same family with them. The Costus group are often called spiral gingers because their leaves spiral up the stem. The spiral is not terribly obvious in the image below, but it’s there, and accounts for asymmetric look of the leaves along the stem.
