ALOCASIA ‘INTERMEDIA’
PARENTAGE: Alocasia longiloba (ovule) x Alocasia longiloba ‘Veitchii’ (pollen)
DESCRIPTION:
Alocasia 'Intermedia' is a Victorian garden hybrid raised at the Chelsea nursery of James Veitch & Sons, and it is exactly what its name says: a plant standing between its two parents.² Blades are long, narrow and sagittate, held stiffly upright rather than drooping, deep metallic olive-green with broad ivory-white midrib and veins, and carried on slender petioles banded and mottled like a tiger's flank.²,⁷ The habit is its selling point — vigorous, freely branching at the base, and far more leafy than either parent. Leaves reached 32 inches within a year of the cross being announced,⁴ and a meter in length under good glass.⁷
Its raisers described it as intermediate in every character between the seed parent and the pollen parent,⁵ while the Ghent nurseryman Louis Van Houtte, figuring it in 1868, wrote more simply that it had the habit of its mother.²
HISTORY:
Veitch & Sons raised it at Chelsea in the mid-1860s by fertilizing a plant of Alocasia longiloba with pollen from the plant they had introduced and sold as Alocasia veitchii — today a named form of the same species.²,⁴ It was shown to the Royal Horticultural Society's Floral Committee in 1867 as "Alocasia (hybrida) intermedia" and certificated,³ and it collected first-class certificates and a medal from both the Royal Horticultural and Royal Botanic societies before it was released.⁵ Veitch put it on the market in 1868 at ten shillings and sixpence, advertising it as "without doubt the finest hybrid Alocasia ever raised," obtained "in our own establishment from the A. longiloba, fertilised with the pollen of A. Veitchii."⁴ That autumn it helped win the class for the best six new plants sent out in the year.⁶
Van Houtte engraved it for the Flore des Serres the same season and added an observation that has aged well.² He had lately imported two wild Alocasias himself, longiloba and the plant he called tigrina, and reported that they had "absolutely the facies" of the hybrid figured beside them — a nurseryman noticing, in 1868, that the celebrated cross looked very like ordinary wild material of one of its parents.²
It then had a long career as an exhibition foliage plant. Gardeners grew it into specimens five and six feet across that took prizes in the fine-foliage classes from the 1870s through the 1900s, and by the end of the century it was cheap enough to sell for a shilling.⁸ German growers bedded it out alongside 'Thibautiana' and 'Watsoniana' in display plantings.⁹ It has since dropped out of cultivation, and it survives mainly in the engravings and the show reports.
NOTES:
1. The parentage is recorded independently by the raisers and by Van Houtte, and both give the same cross in the same direction.²,⁴,⁵
2. Under the modern revision of the genus, both parents belong to Alocasia longiloba: the species itself and the form long grown as Alocasia veitchii.¹⁰ On that reading 'Intermedia' is a cross between two forms of one species, which is consistent with Van Houtte's remark that wild longiloba looked much the same as the hybrid.² Nineteenth-century writers treated the parents as two species.
3. Period sources write the name as Alocasia x intermedia. Araceae hybrids carry no multiplication sign here, so the plant is Alocasia 'Intermedia'.
REFERENCES:
1. Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — Alocasia longiloba Miq.
4. James Veitch & Sons, advertisement. The Gardeners' Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, 1868
5. Alocasia intermedia. The Florist and Pomologist, 1869: 79-80, with illustration
7. Die Gartenwelt 15: 342. 1911