SYNGONIUM PODOPHYLLUM 'WHITE BUTTERFLY'
CULTIVAR DESCRIPTION:
The standard by which other arrowhead vines are measured: an evergreen that trails when young and later climbs on aerial roots, its arrow-shaped juvenile leaves green with cream to white along the veins and a green margin, the white spreading with age until a mature leaf is about 80 percent white with a green border.¹,² In the 1993 Florida trial it was a plant of intermediate habit with coarse leaves recorded as green and gray-green with yellow-silver veins.³ It vines under long days or in low light.²
NOTES:
1. The origin of the cultivar is unknown; the 1987 'Angelwing' patent records that liners of 'White Butterfly' were received from many sources.⁴
2. Most modern Florida cultivars descend from it. University of Florida workers traced 22 named cultivars, all somaclonal variants selected from tissue-cultured populations, back to the original 'White Butterfly' clone,⁶ and AFLP fingerprinting found only 1.2 percent polymorphism within the 'White Butterfly' group, so many of its derivatives cannot be told apart genetically.⁷ Patented sports include 'Jenny Kallert', 'Angelwing' and 'Magnum', and 'Beth' was raised from its self-pollinated seed.⁴
3. Naturalized in Hawaii. Hernandez found plants escaping a fenced garden at Pua'a Ka'a State Wayside on Maui, the distinctive juvenile 'White Butterfly' leaves inside the fence and mature compound leaves outside.⁸
4. Unconfirmed: Hatch suspects it is simply the improved descendant of the 'Albo-lineatum' that William Bull's London nursery had been selling since 1871.⁵ Hatch considers the name to have been used for at least three plants: the true clone, the old 'Albo-lineatum' from which it may descend, and the white-sectored 'Albo-Variegatum', to which it is misapplied.⁵
STORY:
STORY TITLE: One clone, twenty-two cultivars
Nobody knows where 'White Butterfly' came from. When Casa Flora patented a sport of it in 1987 the best its lawyers could say was that the parent had arrived as single liners from many sources.⁴ What is certain is what it became. When Florida's foliage industry moved to tissue culture around 1980, laboratories began multiplying 'White Butterfly' by the million, and the process threw off variants at a rate no bench of cuttings ever had. Growers kept the stable ones and named them. In 2008 Henny and Chen drew the pedigree: 22 named cultivars, every one a somaclonal variant, every one traceable to the single original 'White Butterfly' clone, several of them pink or red where the parent had never shown a trace of either color.⁶
The same team had already tested how different those cultivars really are. In 2006 they fingerprinted nineteen of them with AFLP markers and found that the 'White Butterfly' group differed among themselves at only 1.2 percent of scorable fragments. Seven could be told apart by a unique band; eight could not be distinguished at all, a result the authors put down to DNA methylation or rare mutations rather than to error, and one that led them to call for more genetic diversity in a crop built on one plant.⁷
REFERENCES:
1. Royal Horticultural Society — Syngonium 'White Butterfly'
2. Agri-Starts, Inc., Apopka, Florida — Syngonium 'White Butterfly'
4. Broyles, M.R. 1987. Syngonium plant named Angelwing. US Plant Patent PP6,016
8. Hernandez, J. 2007. In Hawaiian rainforests: exotic aroid ecologies. Aroideana 30: 91–103
Photo by Agri-Starts, Inc., Apopka, Florida
Photos by David J. Stang (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Leaf photos by Derek Ramsey (GFDL 1.2)
