Meaning of red-hot poker | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Many of the species of flowering plants of the genus Kniphofia, that produce an inflorescence in the form of a raceme of red flowers that turn yellow as they mature.
2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see red-hot, poker.

Examples

“1897 Sir Harry Johnston -- British Central Africa The Kniphofia (the “red-hot poker” of our gardens) is on the borderland between the grotesque and the beautiful. When its flower spike is in full bearing and the many little tube-like flowers are scarlet, lightening into yellow, it offers a fine body of colour; but without the bloom the plant⟳ with its limp attenuated leaves (green and spotted with white, having much of the aloe’s fleshiness without its pompous stiffness) looks like⟳ some monstrous caricature of a lily made in a madman’s world.”

CEFR level