ALOCASIA LONGILOBA ‘GRANDIS’
CULTIVAR DESCRIPTION:
Alocasia longiloba 'Grandis' is the big one among the forms of the species once grouped under Alocasia lowii. When London first honored it, the judges described "large shield-shaped leaves… dark olive-green above with a glossy lustre, and traversed with silvery veins along the course of the principal nerves," the undersides "dark purple with a network of slender, transverse green veins."³ Its structural signature is at the base of the blade: the basal lobes meet and join further than in typical plants.²
'Grandis' is not a greenhouse sport. The Malayan agricultural record documents it as the wild Perak race of the plant then called Alocasia lowii — a limestone rock-dweller, distinct from the typical Bornean form.² All of these now fold into Alocasia longiloba,¹ and Burnett carried the plant as Alocasia lowii 'Grandis'.⁴ It still circulates in the trade under both combinations.
HISTORY:
'Grandis' reached its public peak in 1895, when Messrs. Hugh Low & Co. of Clapton — the same firm that had introduced Alocasia lowii itself from Borneo in 1862 — showed the grand form to the Royal Horticultural Society and took an Award of Merit.³
A decade later the Malayan side of the story was written down: planters' literature from the Straits Settlements recorded that the Perak form of the plant then called Alocasia lowii, with its more fully joined basal lobes, "is known as A. Lowi grandis" — a named wild race growing on limestone alongside the typical plant.²
Its longest legacy is as a parent. The Chantrier brothers' hybrid, now listed as Alocasia 'Mortefontanensis', was recorded as this cultivar crossed with Alocasia sanderiana, and an early twentieth-century plant called "hybrida" reportedly came from Alocasia cuprea crossed with 'Grandis'.⁴ When a Miami rare-plant list first printed a parentage for Alocasia 'Amazonica' in 1953, it read "(sanderiana x Lowi-grandis)."⁵ And the name may mark real biology still: in 2002 the Leiden geneticist Ben Zonneveld measured DNA contents of 18.4 picograms in plants sold as lowii 'Grandis' against 22.3 in those sold as lowii 'Veitchii' — "in my opinion they are different species."⁶
CONFUSED WITH: Two unrelated plants have carried the name Alocasia grandis. The Alocasia grandis of the French trade, published in 1868, was a metallica-toned plant with long, marble-striped petioles;⁷ the Alocasia grandis described in England in 1886 was a large green species that botanists now place in Alocasia macrorrhizos.⁸ Neither is this cultivar.
HYBRIDS:
Alocasia ‘Kutawatu’ (Alocasia longiloba ‘Grandis’ x Alocasia indica)
REFERENCES:
1. Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — Alocasia longiloba Miq.
2. Agricultural Bulletin of the Straits and Federated Malay States, n.s. 4: 261–262 (1905)
3. The Gardening World Illustrated 12: 26. 1895
4. Burnett, D. 1984. The cultivated Alocasia. Aroideana 7(3–4): 68–162.
5. Rare Plant List. Fantastic Gardens, South Miami. 1953: 4
6. Zonneveld, B.J.M. Aroid-L, 11 March 2002