Winter Color Source

The flowers look exactly like candy corns, bright golden-yellow shading to a reddish orange. They are even about the same size and shape of this popular candy. Hundreds are scattered over the plant for most of winter and early spring, when almost nothing else is in bloom. And, best of all, the bush is small, lacy and likes shade. What more could you ask for? That it be readily available at nurseries?

It soon should be, since one of the largest wholesale nurseries, Hines, is now growing Justicia rizzini , giving it the common name of Brazilian fuchsia, though “candy corn plant” would be more appropriate. If you can’t find a plant, ask your nursery to order it from Hines.

This is a permanent and untempermental small shrub, growing to about 4 feet tall and as wide. It will grow in fairly dense shade, but is ideal under deciduous trees so it flowers in sunlight when the trees are dormant in winter. It thrives with only average water and in most soils and seems pest-free. A plant in my own garden is 6-years-old and 3 feet tall and blooms every winter under a peach tree; it was started from a cutting from the Betty Marshall garden in Bel-Air, where several plants grew in a permanently shaded canyon bottom.