The Zebra Plant (Not)

My wife and I have some wonderful and long-lived house plants, one of which I thought was a zebra plant, or aphelandra squarrosa.  Ours has been with us for many years, and has outgrown a succession of pots until it now resembles a small tree rather than a potted plant.

I wouldn't be writing about the zebra plant except that ours is significantly different from those I've seen pictured.  Why?  Because it has recently grown a flower stalk, and the flowers do not even come close to looking like those belonging to zebra plants.  Add to that the fact that the flowers bloomed twice from the same pods, and I believed I had a mutant species.

The research I've performed states that only the fortunate homeowner will get the zebra plant to produce flowers.  That was my second clue that something was wrong with my classification of our plant, because we rarely get blooms on any plant we grow.

First I show you the common zebra plant with the typical flowers, yellow and reminiscent of the flower produced by a bromeliad, only with shorter petals.

  This is our plant with its flowers.

 And, finally, above are the two separate bloomings of our plant which occurred over a two-week period.

You can see that the stem had a right curve to it the first time it bloomed, but then it straightened out and bloomed a second time from those same little buds.  The leaves look different from the zebra, as well, so now I had my third suggestion that I must be mistaken.

I got on the Internet and searched for house plants with serrated leaves.  It took some time, but I eventually got to the true name of the plant.  Voilá!  What we have is a croton. 

I suspect our croton will bloom again, too. It is getting new "buds" on that stem, so we might yet have a third generation of flowers.  I guess that makes it a floribunda plant, though I did not come across any indication of that in the research I performed. It is still a miracle for us that we got it to bloom at all, and it is a really neat plant.  I like those little white, spikey flowers.