Prayer Plant - Maranta Red

 
Named for Bartolomeo Maranta, an Italian physician and botanist of the sixteenth century, the Maranta genus includes a few dozen low-growing plants native to the American tropics. The plant gets its common name from the fact that its leaves stay flat during the day and then fold up like praying hands at night.
 
The Maranta leuconeura species has some of the most strikingly beautiful, decorative leaves in the plant kingdom. The popular tricolor variety has deep green, velvety leaves with yellow splotches down the midrib and arching red veins traveling to the leaf margins.
 
A well-grown Maranta should have full, six-inch-long leaves rising from a short center stem and draping down. They are fairly common as houseplants, but not necessarily easy to keep growing over the long-term