

With a tufty head and an uncannily realistic beak, it is a dramatic bloom, a real showstopper in its own right. It also has the nickname Crane Flower, but I think Bird of Paradise sounds much more exotic and tropical, and indeed they look like the birds they are named after.

Queen Charlotte was a patron of the arts and an amateur botanist and helped to expand Kew Gardens. Its real name is Strelitzia reginae (why do these plants have names that are so hard to spell, let alone say?), but apparently it is a plant of nobility, a queen of flora, having been named after Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen consort and wife of King George III.
