Parrot's Beak flower - almost extinct in Tenerife

Parrot's Beak, or Pico de Paloma to give it its Spanish name, is a very beautiful endemic wildflower of Tenerife, which is almost extinct in the wild but surviving in gardens and parks.

Parrot's Beak grows as a trailing vine and makes an ideal carpeting plant for flower beds or for growing over walls. It gets its name from the petals that are curved upward and resemble a bird's beak.

There are actually two very similar species from Tenerife known as Parrot's Beak and both are seriously endangered in the wild. Lotus maculatus , which has yellow and red flowers, is known only from a couple of locations on the northern coast, and Lotus berthelotii, which has scarlet flowers is likewise only found in two places on the island, and the populations are very small in number.

These beautiful flowers have great difficulty producing seed pods and are cultivated from cuttings, however, there are other plants in the lotus family that are common and widely distributed so it is a mystery why this has happened. In the UK and many other countries the Bird's Foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus ) is an exceedingly widespread plant of grassland and sandy places and it is another species in the same family.

It has been suggested in Wikipedia that the endangered species of Parrot's Beak were pollinated by bird species that have themselves died out, although other sources say this is not true because there are birds such as the Chiff Chaff, which can pollinate the flowers.

Another idea is that all the cultivated plants are clones and thus cannot pollinate the others because this would amount to self pollination. If the wild specimens have died or die in future it means that the plants are entirely dependent on humans for their survival.

The related Lotus pyranthus and Lotus eremiticus from the Canary Islands are also both exceedingly rare in the wild in La Palma and only known from single locations on the island.

Sadly I have seen cultivated specimens of the endangered species of lotus removed from flowerbeds, and presumably thrown away, just so that a new lot of geraniums or petunias could be planted. I suppose the gardeners and their bosses don't realise what they are doing and how rare the plants they are taking out are.

The species of Parrot's Beak from the Canary Islands are officially classified as "in danger of extinction" and listed in the National Catalogue of Endangered Species.