As advertised, shrimp plant’s flowing flowers look like a seafood restaurant’s all-you-can-eat special, with tapering, curved, conical rows of overlapping bracts forming launch pads for small, white, tube-shaped blossoms (which, by the way, are butterfly and hummingbird magnets). The species selection of shrimp plant has a rust-red coloration, much like the tint of boiled shrimp.

Following the success of the original reddish shrimp plant, other dazzlers were introduced, including the popular cultivar “Yellow Queen,” which is hard to miss with its blazing yellow bracts. And deep from the quirky corner comes “Fruit Cocktail” with short bracts resembling small, butter-yellow fish waving ruby red flower-hands. No kidding.

Depending on the selection, a happy shrimp plant can stretch three to almost five feet tall. The key to keeping it festooned with blooms in summer is to choose a planting site that has fertile, well-worked soil and receives sun most of the day with some shading later in the afternoon. Shrimp plants can tolerate drought, but will look better if they are mulched and watered once to twice a week during extended dry spells.

Shrimp plant is a tropical perennial from Mexico typically treated as an annual in Carolina Country, but this doesn’t mean you have to wave bye-bye to your botanical babies when the first frosts of fall bite. I’ve successfully overwintered potted shrimp plants indoors in a sunny southern window by trimming them way back (to save space), watering sparingly over the coldest months and misting the leaves occasionally.

Even garden-ground shrimp plants can live again via cuttings taken in the late summer and propagated inside over winter using rooting hormone powder and a moist, sterile growing medium such as perlite or vermiculite.

You can find the reddish species shrimp plant, as well as “Yellow Queen,” at area nurseries . “Fruit Cocktail” might be a little harder to find locally, but go online, with Logee’s Greenhouses being a good place to start e-fishin’