Bessera is a genus of plants in the family Asparagaceae

Asparagaceae

Asparagaceae is the botanical name of a family of flowering plants, placed in the order Asparagales of the monocots.In earlier classification systems, the species involved were often treated as belonging to the family Liliaceae...

, subfamily Brodiaeoideae. A small genus of mostly herbaceous

Herbaceous

A herbaceous plant is a plant that has leaves and stems that die down at the end of the growing season to the soil level. They have no persistent woody stem above ground...

 flowering plants with corm

Corm

A corm is a short, vertical, swollen underground plant stem that serves as a storage organ used by some plants to survive winter or other adverse conditions such as summer drought and heat ....

s, they are perennials

Perennial plant

A perennial plant or simply perennial is a plant that lives for more than two years. The term is often used to differentiate a plant from shorter lived annuals and biennials. The term is sometimes misused by commercial gardeners or horticulturalists to describe only herbaceous perennials...

 native to Mexico. They have flowers with petals and petaloid sepals (tepal

Tepal

Tepals are elements of the perianth, or outer part of a flower, which include the petals or sepals. The term tepal is more often applied specifically when all segments of the perianth are of similar shape and color, or undifferentiated, which is called perigone...

s) with compound pistils.

The genus is named for Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n and Russian

Russian Empire

The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...

 botanist Wilibald Swibert Joseph Gottlieb von Besser

Wilibald Swibert Joseph Gottlieb von Besser

Wilibald Swibert Joseph Gottlieb von Besser was an Austrian-born botanist who worked most of his life within the territory of western Ukraine.The genus Bessera and species Aconitum besserianum are named after him....

(1784–1842).

Bessera elegans, called coral drops, is cultivated and is a half-hardy Mexican herbaceous plant growing from corms with drooping terminal umbels of showy red-and-white colored flowers.