The figwort family
Scrophulariaceae used to be one of the largest families of flowering plants and is now a fraction of that size, because most of what was in it turned out to belong somewhere else. What remains is named after a disease and includes a flower that pays its pollinator in oil.
around 60 genera
roughly 1,800 species
Worldwide, with a strong concentration in southern Africa
Everything in this guide that belongs to Scrophulariaceae
For most of the history of botany this was where anything with a two lipped tubular flower ended up if it had nowhere better to go. At its widest it held something in the region of five thousand species: snapdragons, foxgloves, veronicas, penstemons, mulleins, monkey flowers, and a large group of parasites that feed off the roots of other plants.
Comparing DNA in the late 1990s took it to pieces. The snapdragons and foxgloves and their allies went off to join the plantains, in the biggest single reshuffle of the era. The root parasites were gathered into a family of their own. The monkey flowers left too. What was left holding the original name was a modest group built around figwort and mullein, keeping perhaps a third of what it once had.
This is why an older reference book and a current one will disagree flatly about where a great many common garden plants belong, and neither is careless. The ground genuinely moved.
Figwort is not a decorative plant. The flowers are small, dull, and colored a brownish maroon that reads as almost no color at all, and the whole plant smells faintly unpleasant.
That combination is a specification, not a failure. Figwort is one of very few plants in the northern hemisphere pollinated principally by wasps, which are unimpressed by bright petals and quite interested in a dull brown cup of accessible nectar that smells slightly of meat. A figwort in flower in July will have wasps on it and very little else.
The name is medical. The plant produces knobbly swellings on its roots, and those were taken to resemble the swollen neck glands of scrofula, a tubercular condition once common enough to be called the king's evil. Under the doctrine that a plant advertises its use through its appearance, that made it the treatment, and both the English name and the scientific one still carry the diagnosis.
The best thing in this family is in South Africa. A group of small flowers here does not offer nectar at all. Instead each flower carries two narrow spurs pointing backward, and at the bottom of each spur is a supply of oil, secreted by glands and collected by the insect for lining its nest and feeding its larvae.
Only one group of bees can get it. The females have front legs extraordinarily elongated for their body size, and they hover at the flower and reach one leg down each of the two spurs at once, mopping the oil up with dense brushes of hair. While they are doing that, the flower is pressing pollen onto their backs.
The fit is exact and it has been measured across populations: where the spurs are longer, the local bees have longer legs, and where they are shorter, so are the legs. The two are locked together, each generation of flowers selecting on the bees and the bees selecting right back.
Mullein is the other survivor worth knowing: a tall biennial that spends its first year as a flat rosette of thick, pale, densely felted leaves and its second sending up a single stiff spike of yellow flowers, often taller than a person, on waste ground and roadsides.
The spike had a practical afterlife. Dried and dipped in tallow or fat it burns steadily as a torch, and it was used that way widely enough to collect names in several languages meaning candle or taper. The felted leaves were used as lamp wicks, as padding inside shoes, and as an improvised dressing.
The shrub this page is here for has had the least settled classification of anything in the family. It has been placed in a family of its own, then with the strychnine relatives, and now here, and the current position rests on molecular evidence rather than on anything you could see by looking at it. In a family this heavily rearranged, that is entirely in keeping.