Cooper's hibiscus

About the plant

The Victorians discovered in the 1860s that a plant could be grown for its leaves alone, and the hunt for variegated and coloured foliage for the stove house began. John Gould Veitch, on his Pacific voyage of 1860–61, sent home from the New Hebrides the crotons that became the rage of the decade, and with them this hibiscus, a form of the Chinese shoe flower in which every leaf is marbled with cream, pink and crimson as if it had been dipped in paint. Veitch's named it for Daniel Cooper, one of their men, and it went round Europe within two years.

Van Houtte's lithographers at Ghent drew it for the Flore des serres in 1863 with the care usually given to a flower, the leaves at natural size and every blotch in place. The flowers are small and scarlet and rarely shown; the plant was and is grown for its leaves, which colour best in full sun, and it remains a common hedge and pot plant across the tropics, still under Cooper's name, a century and a half after it left Veitch's hands.