ALOCASIA LONGILOBA ‘LOWII’

Cultivar

CULTIVAR DESCRIPTION:

Alocasia longiloba 'Lowii' is the plant that taught Victorian England what this species could be: a long, deeply lobed blade of dark metallic green, the stout midrib, principal veins, and margin drawn in clean white, the underside a deep purple. Blades on strong plants reach fourteen to sixteen inches, carried on petioles about as long as the leaf, sheathed below in pale purplish scales.³ In the wild this is a limestone plant — a rock-dweller of Borneo, Perak, and Selangor, told from its relatives by its clear light-green petiole.⁸

'Lowii' is a named form of Alocasia longiloba, and under that species the old varietal names still orbit it: 'Grandis' began as the Perak wild form with more fully joined basal lobes, and a variegated plant circulated in the 1860s as var. picta.⁴,⁸ By 1984 David Burnett counted "literally scores" of lowii variants in collections and declined to name them all.¹⁰ Plants are still widely sold under the old species name Alocasia lowii.¹

STORY:

STORY TITLE: The plant with two birth certificates

In the summer of 1862, Messrs. Low and Co. of Clapton received from Borneo a plant they believed to be a Caladium.⁷ It was shown almost at once — the Royal Horticultural Society's Floral Committee lists a First Certificate to Low & Co. for Alocasia Lowii among the newly introduced plants of 1860 to 1862 — before any botanist had published a word about it.⁵

Then came the race. In January 1863 Charles Lemaire published it in Ghent as Caladium? lowii — question mark his own, from a plant in Verschaffelt's nursery — with a chromolithograph that remains the nomenclatural type of the name.² Four months later, unaware or unpersuaded, William Hooker published the same plant from Low's own stock as Alocasia lowii, "Mr. Low's Alocasia," recording that it had flowered in the Clapton stove that January.³ Two journals, two countries, two genera, one plant — and gardeners spent the decade sorting out the wreckage. Shirley Hibberd, giving it a color plate in 1870, opened his account with the three names it had already worn and blamed the genera themselves: Alocasia and Caladium are simply indistinguishable when young.⁷

The plant traveled fast. By 1864 it had flowered in Berlin, under the care of head gardener Boese in the collection of Kommerzienrat Leonor Reichenheim, and the German garden press ran careful measurements of it beside its look-alike Alocasia veitchii.⁶ In April 1865 it was on the Royal Horticultural Society's weekly show tables from two directions at once — a small plant from Mr. Bull, and "the metallic green Alocasia Lowii" from Messrs. Lee of Hammersmith.⁵ A variegated form communicated by E. G. Henderson and Son in April 1864 was figured in the Botanical Magazine the following year as var. picta.⁴

A century of cultivation never quite pulled 'Lowii' free of its relatives, and in the end the botanists stopped trying to keep them apart: in 1998 Alistair Hay placed Alocasia lowii within Alocasia longiloba, keeping 'lowii' as the informal name for this broad-bladed, rock-dwelling, Peninsular Malaysian and northwest Bornean form — one that intergrades with 'korthalsii' in Sarawak and with typical 'longiloba' elsewhere.⁹ The lumping has not settled the biology: in 2002 the Leiden geneticist Ben Zonneveld measured markedly different DNA contents in plants sold as lowii 'Veitchii' and lowii 'Grandis' — in his words, "in my opinion they are different species" — a reminder that the old varietal names may still mark real distinctions.¹¹

ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION: Caladium? lowii Lem., L'Illustration Horticole 10: t.360 (January 1863); Alocasia lowii Hook., Curtis's Botanical Magazine t.5376 (May 1863).

HYBRIDS:

Alocasia ‘Bachii’ (Alocasia reginae x Alocasia longiloba ‘Lowii’)

Alocasia ‘Ivory Coast’ (Alocasia ‘Aurora’ x Alocasia longiloba ‘Lowii’)

Alocasia ‘Mortefontanensis’ (Alocasia longiloba ‘Lowii’ x Alocasia sanderiana)

Alocasia ‘Orchid Jungle’ (Alocasia cuprea x Alocasia longiloba ‘Lowii’)

REFERENCES:

1. Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — Alocasia longiloba Miq.

2. Lemaire, C. 1863. Caladium? lowii. L'Illustration Horticole 10: t.360

3. Hooker, W.J. 1863. Alocasia Lowii. Curtis's Botanical Magazine 89: t.5376

4. Hooker, J.D. 1865. Alocasia Lowii var. picta. Curtis's Botanical Magazine 91: t.5497

5. Proceedings of the Royal Horticultural Society of London 3–5 (1863–1865)

6. Wochenschrift des Vereines zur Beförderung des Gartenbaues in den Königlich Preussischen Staaten 7 (1864)