Yellow Firecracker Plant
(Russelia equisetiformis ‘Lemon Falls’)

Boardwalk along Dragonfly Lake

Looking for a graceful, free-flowering plant to cascade over the sides of sunny window boxes, raised planter beds, and hanging baskets? This uncommon ‘Lemon Falls’ cultivar of the firecracker plant (Russelia equisetiformis) might just be the perfect fit!

Captivated by the sprays of slender, pale yellow to ivory five-petaled flowers just 2.5cm long, it can be easy to overlook that this creeping, weeping subshrub, which only rarely tops 1.5m in height, is seemingly missing a key plant part: leaves!

A closer look at the left and centre photos in the montage below reveals that the bright green young branches of the plant have small scale-like leaves about 8.5 to 15mm long in whorls along each node, but these soon drop off as the branch ages. How then does the plant continue to photosynthesise with no leaves, making sugars from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide? Through the chloroplasts in its finely branched whorls of deep green stems, of course!

Want something brighter and bolder? In the seasonally dry areas of Mexico and Guatemala where this species is native, wild populations of the firecracker plant bear nectar-rich flowers of brilliant red to attract their slender-beaked hummingbird pollinators! Here in Singapore and other areas of the Old World tropics, some birds visit the bright red blooms as well! Sunbirds, the African and Asian nectar-feeding counterparts of hummingbirds, also feed from firecracker plant flowers. Most sunbirds are unable to hover quite as well as hummingbirds and usually look for a convenient branch to perch on while sipping nectar from flowers. 

After successful pollination and fertilisation, the flower develops into a small, round, inedible capsule that splits open when dry and ripe to shed its seeds. Firecracker plant can also be easily propagated by rooting stem cuttings or by clump division.

A member of the plantago family (Plantaginaceae), a large family of about 2,260 species, the firecracker plant is also related to several other popular ornamental flowering plants, including snapdragons (Antirrhinum spp. and cultivars) and foxgloves (Digitalis spp. and cultivars). As you might guess from its common name, red is also the most common flower colour of this species in cultivation! The origins of this pale yellow ‘Lemon Falls’ cultivar are unclear, but it may have come about from a sharp-eyed horticulturist’s selection of a chance ‘sport’ or naturally occurring genetic mutation that resulted in a branch bearing flowers lacking red pigments in the petals. Reversions back to the natural red petal colour can also happen, if rarely, resulting in ‘Lemon Falls’ plants with branches bearing both yellow and red, or sometimes even two-toned flowers as shown in the photo below. 

Find the ‘Lemon Falls’ cultivar of the firecracker plant cascading over the raised planter beds along boardwalk on the southwestern side of Dragonfly Lake!  

This article is part of our What's Blooming series.