Cockscomb

Cockscomb is Celosia, a genus of the amaranth family native to tropical Africa, Asia and the Americas, grown almost everywhere in the warm world both as an ornamental and, in west Africa and southeast Asia, as a leaf vegetable. The garden forms fall into two groups. The cristata or crested kinds carry a fasciated inflorescence, a growing point flattened and folded into a dense velvety brain-like ridge that does genuinely resemble the comb of a cockerel; the plumosa kinds keep the flowers in upright feathery spires. The genus name comes from the Greek keleos, burning, for the scarlet, orange and magenta of the typical forms. The crested shape is a developmental abnormality that has been selected and fixed by gardeners rather than a normal wild form, which makes the plant a small and vivid example of how ornamental horticulture works.

In Nigeria the young leaves of Celosia argentea are a staple vegetable known in Yoruba as soko yokoto, roughly make the husband fat and happy, cooked into a rich stew and eaten far more widely there as everyday food than as an ornamental, a use standing in real contrast to the crested, brain-like cristata forms grown purely for show in Western gardens. The same plant appears as a leaf vegetable in parts of Southeast Asia and China, so that a single genus does double duty across the world, prized in one region chiefly for its startling ornamental shape and in another simply as a nutritious, fast-growing green.

Sources Plants of the World OnlineRoyal Botanic Gardens, Kew with Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

The bloom holds its colour for an extraordinary length of time, on the plant and after cutting, and dries almost without loss; that single property is the root of nearly all its symbolism. In the western language of flowers it stands for immortality, unfading affection and, with a lighter touch, for foppery and good humour, the last from the strut of the bird whose comb it copies. The same durability gave it a place in ritual use across the tropics: in Mexico the crimson cresta de gallo is one of the flowers of the Day of the Dead altars alongside the marigold, and in parts of India and Nepal celosia is used in temple garlands and, in Nepal, in the garlands of the Tihar festival. These are living practices of particular communities, described here from the outside; where the atlas records them, the local meaning belongs to the community that keeps it, and the general emblem of unfading colour is the western reading rather than a universal one.