van swearingen@Flickr is the contributor of today''s photograph from Huntington Botanical Gardens in California (original | BPotD Flickr Group Pool). Thank you!

Golden fuchsia seems to be the common name for this plant (though it''s not a fuchsia). On the correlation topic of its scientific name, a team of Hungarian taxonomists have suggested it be renamed Csapodya splendens, but the GRIN Taxonomy Database has retained Deppea splendens (so far).

Despite the cosmopolitan distribution of its family, the Rubiaceae (madder or coffee family), Deppea splendens was “only known from a canyon on the south slope of Cerro Mozotal in southern Chiapas, where it naturally occurred as a fifteen- to twenty-five-foot shrub or small tree in pine-oak cloud forest within sight of the Pacific Ocean.” This site was cleared for farmland in 1986; Deppea splendens is now presumed extinct in the wild (though some hope exists that it may be rediscovered on other nearby mountains in Chiapas, Mexico and neighbouring Guatemala). Its original discovery by Western science occurred in 1972, though it remained unrecognized as a novel species for a long time; in fact, it was not published and described in the scientific literature until 1987, a year after its possible demise in the wild.

The quote above is from an account of the species in the April 2000 issue of Pacific Horticulture magazine, available online via San Francisco Botanical Garden: Deppea splendens (PDF) by Kathy Musial. If you have the time to read the article, I can find no better written piece about the species. If you''ve only a short amount of time, a brief article is available from the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden newsletter: Deppea splendens by Rand Plewak.

A photograph of the foliage is available via frequent BPotD contributor Eric in SF''s PlantWorld site: Deppea splendens. Posted by: Daniel Mosquin    Source

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