Elephant ear

Getting started

usually arrives as an established pot or a bagged corm — a nursery plant starts partway up the size ladder, not at the bottom

• day 0–353–5 weeks · warmth first

  Waking the corm

  A corm is a bulb of stored season, and it spends the first fortnight underground making roots before it will spend anything on a leaf. Warm (24 °C+) and barely moist is the whole recipe; cool and wet at this stage is how a corm turns to mush instead of a plant.

  Nothing above the soil for weeks — the work is all underneath.

  see it on the strip ↑
• day 35–365the first year

  The size ladder

  The first leaf is a coin, the second a saucer, the third a hand. An elephant ear doesn't grow its leaves bigger — it grows BIGGER LEAVES, one at a time, each from a fresh stalk, and the ladder only climbs while it is warm and fed. A first-year plant carries two or three small shields and looks nothing like the thing on the plant-shop shelf.

  Every new leaf is bigger than the last one. That never stops being satisfying.

  see it on the strip ↑

Typical timeline

• the plantAPR – OCT

  Shield after shield

  The growing half of the year: a new blade unrolls every two to four weeks in real warmth, each on its own stalk, each a little larger. The plant holds a fixed hand of leaves — so an old one yellowing off as a new one opens is the trade, not a symptom. On humid mornings the leaf tips bead water (guttation: root pressure pushing sap out through hydathodes while the stomata are shut) — the plant telling you the soil is fuller than the air is thirsty.

  A fresh spear every few weeks, and each one opens bigger than the last.

  see it on the strip ↑
• the plantNOV – MAR

  The retreat

  Cool and dim and the plant withdraws into its corm — leaves yellow and go one by one, and indoors it may end the winter as a bare pot. It is not dead. Tip the corm out and it is firm and heavy, and it is holding next spring's first three leaves. What kills it now is kindness: the watering habit continued into a plant that has stopped drinking.

  A bare pot in January is a plant asleep with its bags packed.

  see it on the strip ↑
• flowering · rareJUN – AUG · RARE INDOORS

  Night-scented spathe

  A pale green hood around a cream spadix, and the reason the species is called odora: the scent comes at dusk. It is a warm-blooded flower — the spadix RUNS ITS OWN FURNACE, measured at 30 °C at noon against 25 °C air, which volatilises the perfume and makes the hood a warm room. Two drosophilid flies (Colocasiomyia alocasiae and C. xenalocasiae) breed nowhere else on earth: they arrive for the female phase, mate and lay inside the hood, and the spathe's constriction then tightens and walks them up into the male zone in time for the pollen. A houseplant that flowers is doing all of this for nobody.

  Someday, at dusk: a hood that smells of lilies and runs five degrees warm.

  see it on the strip ↑
• fruiting · rareSEP – NOV · WILD ONLY

  Cob of red berries

  In the wild the spathe rots back off a cob of orange-red berries, packed like corn. Your 'Regal Shields' cannot do this even if it flowers, and the reason is printed in its own plant patent: the breeder counted about 70 female flowers per spadix and recorded the male flowers as UNDEVELOPED. The hybrid is pollen-less. It is a plant that can be a mother and never a father, and it has never once needed either — every 'Regal Shields' alive is a cutting of the one 2013 seedling.

  The rarest card in this deck — and this particular plant is holding a hand it can't play.

  see it on the strip ↑
• undergroundMAY – SEP

  Corms and pups

  The corm spends the warm season budding CORMELS — little brown knuckles on short runners, often surfacing at the edge of the pot where you can see them. Each is a whole plant in a tin, and the ones that break dormancy come up beside the parent as two-leaf pups. This is how the plant reproduces in practice: 'Regal Shields' was first multiplied by corm division in 2008, and it has been divided rather than sown ever since.

  see it on the strip ↑
• undergroundNOV – MAR

  The cold-wet window

  What actually kills elephant ears, every time. A dormant corm drinks almost nothing; cold soggy soil around it goes anaerobic and the corm turns soft from the inside while the pot looks merely quiet. Keep it barely damp and above about 15 °C and it will keep. Roots this genus makes are worth protecting — a well-grown plant coils a metre of thick white cord around the inside of its pot.

  see it on the strip ↑

Quiet stretch — winter retreat · water far less, never cold.

Care milestones

• waterMAR – MID-APR

  Wake it with warmth

  Don't water it awake — warm it awake. Move it back into real light, let the room come up, and only then start watering as the first spear appears. Water applied to a cold dormant corm goes nowhere and stays there.

  see it on the strip ↑
• repotAPR · EVERY 1–2 YR

  Repot snug, not roomy

  Go up one size and no more. A big pot is a big volume of wet soil the roots cannot occupy, and that is the rot story again in a different pot. Free-draining and chunky — these are riverbank and swamp-margin plants, but they grow at the water's edge, not in it.

  see it on the strip ↑
• feedAPR – SEP

  Feed the shields

  Every big leaf is an expensive object and the plant is building one a fortnight. A balanced feed at half strength every two or three waterings through the growing half of the year — and nothing at all once it starts to withdraw.

  see it on the strip ↑
• divideMID-APR – MAY

  Lift the pups

  Spring, as it wakes: tip the whole thing out, and the pups and loose cormels come away with a twist. Pot the pups with their own roots; the bare cormels go in a bag of damp moss somewhere warm and sprout on their own schedule, which can be a fortnight or half a year.

  see it on the strip ↑
• watchMAY – SEP

  Look under the leaves

  The real indoor enemy is not rot in summer, it is spider mites, and a big thin Alocasia leaf is their favourite address. Fine stippling on the top face and webbing in the vein angles underneath — check the UNDERSIDE weekly in warm dry rooms, because by the time the top looks bronzed you are already losing the leaf.

  see it on the strip ↑
• waterOCT – FEB

  Ease off with the light

  Its thirst tracks the light and the light is collapsing. Let the top third of the mix dry before you go near it, use tepid water, and never leave the pot standing in a saucer. This one habit is most of the difference between a corm that returns in March and one that doesn't.

  see it on the strip ↑
• watchNOV – MAR

  Don't bin the bare pot

  If it drops every leaf, park it — bright, above 15 °C, barely damp, no feed, no repotting — and wait. Squeeze the corm through the soil: firm is a sleeping plant, squishy is a lost one. Most elephant ears thrown away in winter were alive.

  see it on the strip ↑

Year by year

• year 1

  The size ladder

  Year one is small on purpose, and the only thing worth measuring is whether each new leaf beats the last. Warmth, bright indirect light, feed while it is growing — and no flowers, no pups, no drama. The corm is buying next year.

  see it on the strip ↑
• years 2–4

  Full shields — and the first pups

  The blades arrive at full size and the corm starts making children: cormels around the base, then two-leaf pups standing up beside the parent. A plant in this chapter is doing two jobs at once, which is why it is hungry, and it is the best possible moment to divide.

  see it on the strip ↑
• year 5+

  The colony years

  Left alone, one corm becomes a clump and the clump competes with itself — everyone's leaves get smaller. From here on the yearly question is not how to grow it but whether to split it, and a spring division resets the whole pot to full-size shields.

  see it on the strip ↑

Botanical drawing

Flora de Filipinas, Gran edición, pl. 177 (Blanco, 1880–83) — as 'Arum grandifolium' / 'Alocasia montana?'