Haemanthus coccineus Haemanthus coccineus Haemanthus coccineus, the blood flower, blood lily or paintbrush lily, is a species of flowering plant in the amaryllis family Amaryllidaceae, native to Southern Africa. Growing to tall and wide, it is a bulbous perennial with short brown stems surmounted by red flowers, the flowers appearing in spring and summer, before the strap-shaped leaves. The generic name "Haemanthus" is derived from the Greek words "haima" for blood and "anthos" for flower; "coccineus" is the Latin word for red or scarlet. In the Afrikaans language it is known as bergajuin, bloedblom, and many other vernacular names. "Haemanthus coccineus" is
Flowering plant seed plants and later angiosperms appears to be the result of two distinct rounds of whole genome duplication events. These occurred at and . Another possible whole genome duplication event at perhaps created the ancestral line that led to all modern flowering plants. That event was studied by sequencing the genome of an ancient flowering plant, "Amborella trichopoda", and directly addresses Darwin's ""abominable mystery"." The earliest known macrofossil confidently identified as an angiosperm, "Archaefructus liaoningensis", is dated to about 125 million years BP (the Cretaceous period), whereas pollen considered to be of angiosperm origin takes the fossil record back to