ALOCASIA LONGILOBA ‘THIBAUTIANA’

Cultivar

CULTIVAR DESCRIPTION:

Alocasia longiloba 'Thibautiana' is the form of the species that the Victorian press called the finest of all the Alocasias. The blade is broad, ovate to sagittate, shallowly peltate, and very large for the group: a single young leaf measured at Chelsea in 1879 was 24 inches long by 17 inches across.⁵ The upper surface is a deep, lustrous olive to black-green, the midrib and primary veins broad and ivory-white, the underside a uniform wine-purple.²,⁸ The petiole is pale green, faintly cross-barred with brown, and the plant sits on a short, swollen, corm-like stem, a mark the modern revision uses to recognize the form.⁸,¹⁷ In the wild it is a robust, often lithophytic herb of low elevations, growing on limestone rocks or on the forest floor.¹⁷

'Thibautiana' is a named form of Alocasia longiloba,¹ described in 1878 as a species and now treated as one of the entities within that variable species.¹⁷ It intergrades with 'Lowii', and young plants strongly resemble 'Korthalsii', which is part of why the two names were later confused.¹⁷ The epithet is a legacy Latin-form name, retained as a cultivar epithet as the cultivar code allows for names of its era. It honors L. Thibaut of the Sceaux nursery Thibaut & Keteleer, in his day one of the leading nurserymen of the Continent.¹⁴

HISTORY:

The plant reached James Veitch & Sons of Chelsea from Borneo, and Maxwell Masters described it in The Gardeners' Chronicle on April 27th, 1878, as Alocasia thibautiana: "a new and very handsome Alocasia … much in the way of A. Lowii, but a finer thing," with veins "thick, brilliant white on a black-green ground."² In a footnote he matched it to a specimen Odoardo Beccari had collected in Sarawak, number 382 in the Kew herbarium, a guess that would follow the name for twenty years.² The Royal Botanic Society gave it a Botanical Certificate at Regent's Park in June 1878, and contemporary accounts credit it with a First-class Certificate from the Royal Horticultural Society as well.³,⁷

Veitch grew stock for two years before selling. The Chronicle's review of the new plants of 1878 called it "a noble plant in the way of A. Lowii, but probably finer,"⁴ and in July 1879, after measuring that 24-inch leaf at Chelsea, the same paper wrote that Alocasia veitchii and "its twin sister A. Lowii" were "now completely eclipsed by Messrs. Veitch's new Alocasia Thibautiana … it will turn out to be the finest of all the Alocasias."⁵ The firm sent it out in April 1880 at 31 shillings and sixpence to 63 shillings a plant, with a woodcut in its catalog.⁶ The French press agreed on the ranking, calling it "certainly the most beautiful of all," though L'Illustration Horticole took it for a hybrid.⁷

The following year the same journal published N. E. Brown's Latin diagnosis and a chromolithograph of the leaf, the only color portrait the plant ever received.⁸ Brown recorded a flowering, rejected Masters' Beccari match outright, and added a claim found nowhere else: that the plant had reached the Parc de la Tête d'Or in Lyon in 1872, six years before the London description.⁸ The Sarawak specimen kept moving. In 1887 Brown made it the basis of his Alocasia eminens, noting that Beccari himself had filed it under Alocasia longiloba,⁹ and in 1898 Hans Hallier wrote that 'Thibautiana', eminens and the new 'Watsoniana' all belonged within the circle of forms of Alocasia longiloba, differing "only by broader and shorter leaves."¹²

Through the 1880s it headed Veitch's exhibition groups and won the fine-foliage classes at provincial shows, and Florentine breeders made it the parent of their silver-veined hybrids.¹⁰ By 1895 the Chronicle, printing an engraving from a photograph of a many-leaved specimen, called it "the handsomest of its section, and one of the most ornamental of stove plants," yet "not at the present day to be found in many gardens," and explained why: rested in too cool a house, "they so often perish, and are consequently always scarce."¹¹ Kew still grew it in 1897.¹⁴ In Singapore the growers of 1905 saw it as the silver-netted form of their common Alocasia denudata.¹³

Its name then went underground. Engler and Krause sank Alocasia thibautiana into Alocasia korthalsii in 1920,¹⁵ and the twentieth century followed them: Burnett wrote in 1984 that the plants circulating in Australia under both names "are in fact varietal forms of A. lowii."¹⁶ In 1998 Alistair Hay separated the two again. Because no specimen had ever been kept, he chose as the name's type a leaf preserved at Kew in January 1879 from Veitch's original plant, and he could find no wild Bornean material that matched it; the entity he recognizes as 'thibautiana' lives in Peninsular Malaysia, on limestone, and only doubtfully in Sarawak.¹⁷

That geography comes from a second plant, described a century earlier and kept separate ever since. In 1894 N. E. Brown published Alocasia curtisii at Kew from living material Charles Curtis had sent home from Penang, its blades peltate and ovate-sagittate, bright or metallic green above and purple beneath, the veins pale whitish-green on paler ribs — the plant on this page, in other words, described a second time from the other end of its range.¹⁸ Hay united the two, so that what is now called 'Thibautiana' takes in both the Chelsea plant of unproven Bornean origin and the Penang plant with a documented one.¹⁷ It is the Penang material that anchors the form to the Malay Peninsula, and it is worth noticing that the older name never described a wild plant at all: Masters had only Veitch's stock, while Curtis could say exactly where his came from.

HYBRIDS: The crosses of the 1880s were recorded with the plant then called Alocasia thibautiana as a parent: Alocasia 'Luciani' (with 'Putzeysii', Florence, 1885),¹⁰ Alocasia 'Pucciana' (the reverse cross, the same year), Alocasia 'Kerchoveana', and later Alocasia 'Martin Cahuzac' and Alocasia 'Rodigasiana'. Twentieth-century synonymy read that parent as 'Korthalsii',¹⁵,¹⁶ and the pages for those hybrids keep that reading: where they name Alocasia longiloba 'Korthalsii' as a parent, the plant the breeders recorded was the one described here.

CONFUSED WITH: 'Korthalsii', with which the name was merged from 1920 to 1998; juvenile leaves of 'Thibautiana' resemble it, but the adult is a broader, shallowly peltate, corm-stemmed plant.¹⁷ 'Lowii', into which it intergrades in the wild.¹⁷ Alocasia curtisii is not a separate plant but this one, described from Penang in 1894 and united with it in 1998.¹⁷,¹⁸ Beccari's Sarawak specimen 382, matched to this plant in 1878, is now placed under 'Lowii' by way of Alocasia eminens.⁹,¹⁷ The Australian trade plants sold under the name were forms of 'Lowii'.¹⁶

REFERENCES:

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

2. Masters, M.T. 1878. New garden plants: Alocasia Thibautiana. The Gardeners' Chronicle, n.s. 9: 527 (27 April 1878)

3. The Gardeners' Chronicle, n.s. 9: 773 (15 June 1878). Royal Botanic Society, June 12.

4. The Gardeners' Chronicle, n.s. 11: 10 (4 January 1879)

5. The Gardeners' Chronicle, n.s. 12: 82 (19 July 1879)

6. The Gardeners' Chronicle, n.s. 13: 518 (24 April 1880)

7. L'Illustration Horticole 27: 75. 1880

8. Brown, N.E. 1881. Alocasia Thibautiana. L'Illustration Horticole 28: 72, pl. 419

9. Brown, N.E. 1887. Alocasia eminens. The Gardeners' Chronicle, ser. 3, 1: 105 (22 January 1887)

10. Rodigas, É. 1887. Alocasia Luciani. L'Illustration Horticole 34: 75, pl. 27.

11. The Gardeners' Chronicle, ser. 3, 17: 485, fig. 68 (20 April 1895)