AMORPHOPHALLUS MUELLERI
PROTOLOGUE: Amorphophallus muelleri Blume, published in Rumphia 1: 143 (1837). The protologue is reproduced below.
SYNONYMS:
HOMOTYPIC SYNONYMS: Amorphophallus blumei (Schott) Engl. in A.L.P.P.de Candolle & A.C.P.de Candolle, Monogr. Phan. 2: 316 (1879), nom. illeg. Brachyspatha muelleri (Blume) Schott in Syn. Aroid.: 36 (1856) Conophallus blumei Schott in Ann. Mus. Bot. Lugduno-Batavi 1: 124 (1863), nom. illeg. Conophallus muelleri (Blume) Miq. in Ann. Mus. Bot. Lugduno-Batavi 1: 286 (1864)
HETEROTYPIC SYNONYMS: Amorphophallus burmanicus Hook.f. in Fl. Brit. India 6: 517 (1893) Amorphophallus erubescens Hett. in Blumea 39: 253 (1994) Amorphophallus planus Teijsm. & Binn. in Natuurk. Tijdschr. Ned.-Indië 24: 331 (1862) Amorphophallus timorensis Alderw. in Bull. Jard. Bot. Buitenzorg, sér. 3, 1: 370 (1920) Arum muelleri Zipp. ex Blume in Rumphia 1: 143 (1837), pro syn. Conophallus planus (Teijsm. & Binn.) Miq. in Ann. Mus. Bot. Lugduno-Batavi 1: 286 (1864)
OTHER NAMES: porang (Indonesian)
DISTRIBUTION: Assam to W. Malesia: Andaman Islands, Assam, Borneo, Java, Lesser Sunda Islands, Myanmar, Sumatra, Thailand.
DISTRIBUTION NOTE: From the Andaman Islands eastward through Myanmar into northern Thailand and southeastward on Sumatra, Java, Flores, and Timor⁴.
SPECIES DESCRIPTION:
Tuber globose or depressed-globose, dark brown, yellow inside, to 28 cm in diam., no annual offsets, rootscars annuliform, swollen. Leaf solitary, occasionally two on one tuber; petiole smooth, 40-180 cm long, 1-8 cm in diam. (base), green, olive green, brownish green or almost black, with numerous large elongate-elliptic, diamond shaped or stripelike, pale green spots, and sometimes with an additional high number of small, pale green, rounded dots; lamina highly dissected, 75-200 cm in diam., in the center carrying epiphyllar bulbils on the major branchings and on the most distal branches; leaflets lanceolate or elliptic lanceolate, acuminate, base strongly and broadly decurrent, 10-40 cm long, 4-15 cm in diam., upper surface green or dark green with a narrow, whitish or pinkish red margin, especially when young, leaflets of seedlings dark emerald green with a reddish flush and strongly red margins; bulbils depressed, rounded or elongate, greyish brown, 0.5-6 cm in diam., 1-40 per leaf.⁴
INFLORESCENCE:
Inflorescence solitary, long-peduncled; peduncle as petiole, 30-60 cm long, 0.5-3 cm in diam. (base); spathe broader than long, rarely slightly the reverse, very broadly triangular or transversely elliptic, coriaceous, marcescent, 7.5-27 cm long, 6.0-27 cm in diam., base strongly convolute and slightly or clearly constricted at the top, limb semi-erect or spreading, often partly horizontal, margin reflexed, ± suddenly narrowed to the top, the latter very obtuse, base within nearly smooth or with numerous small, elongate warts, these often confluent, outside base pale green or pale dirty pinkish with, usually transversely elongate, whitish spots and few small, blackish green dots, upwards grading to brownish purple or dark greyish green, with large, ± isodiametrical white spots, inside base dark pink or pale yellowish pink, upwards grading to purplish or brownish with dirty pale greenish and dirty pale brown, transversely oval spots. Spadix sessile or stipitate or intermediate, longer than spathe, 8-30 cm long, drying in fruit and remaining, stipe 0.1-1.5 cm long.⁴
ECOLOGY:
Found in disturbed areas; altitude: to 900 m⁴
PROPAGATION:
This was an easy to root species, with results ranging from 100% with July cuttings to 37.5% with early September cuttings. With proper timing, this was among the species that rooted at the highest percentages in the trials.
ETYMOLOGY:
Named in honor of Salomon Müller (1804–1864), German zoologist and natural-history collector who worked extensively in the Dutch East Indies. The history of the name is unusually well documented: Alexander Zippelius first used the epithet in an unpublished Arum name in Müller’s honor, and Blume later published the plant as Amorphophallus muelleri. The spelling muelleri represents the Latinized treatment of the German surname Müller.
NOTES:
1. Amorphophallus muelleri is very similar in habit to Amorphophallus bulbifer and Amorphophallus erubescens; Amorphophallus bulbifer has a spadix equalling or shorter than the spathe, an always pinkish limb interior, one-locular ovaries and a stigma usually wider than the ovary. Seeds are freely produced without pollination — the species is apomictic — and it is one of the very few members of the genus with an extensive geographical distribution, which accounts for its high number of synonyms. In older literature on the Javan flora the name was long misused for what is now Amorphophallus annulifer.⁴
2. In Indonesia the species is the porang, cultivated at field scale as a glucomannan crop second only to konjac: the corms are sliced, dried and exported as chips or milled flour, and porang farming has become the subject of national agricultural policy.⁸
3. Blume published the species in Rumphia from Javan material, taking up Zippelius's unpublished garden name — the epithet honours Salomon Müller, the naturalist then exploring the Dutch East Indies.²
STORY:
STORY TITLE: Konjac's understudy takes the stage
When Carl Ludwig Blume published this species in his Rumphia in 1837, he took up a name that had been waiting in manuscript: Arum Mulleri, coined by the collector Zippelius for Salomon Müller, the German-born naturalist then criss-crossing the Dutch East Indies. It was a botanist's courtesy, attached to a plant nobody would have picked as economically important: a Javan aroid with bulbils sitting in the forks of its leaf.
Those bulbils were the future. Amorphophallus muelleri drops them by the dozen — up to forty per leaf — and each one is a ready-made new plant; the species also sets seed without pollination, one of the genus's few true apomicts. A crop that plants itself twice over. Indonesia noticed: as porang, the species has become the country's answer to konjac, its corms sliced, dried and exported as chips and flour for the same glucomannan that made its Chinese-Japanese cousin famous. Porang went from village supplement to national agricultural policy — the subject of an official export-promotion movement, with farming sustainability now a research field of its own.
There is a quiet irony in the family resemblance. Konjac, domesticated for two millennia, no longer clearly shows which of its traits are wild and which were bred; porang is at the other end of the same road, a wild species walking into cultivation within living memory. The two now share the world's glucomannan market — and a genus. Blume's courtesy to a travelling naturalist turned out to be one of the more valuable names in the Araceae.
REFERENCES:
1. Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — Amorphophallus muelleri Blume
2. Rumphia 1: 143 (1837) — protologue.
3. Alan Galloway — Amorphophallus muelleri, alangallowaybotanicals.com.
4. Aroideana 19 (1996):P7 - 131
5. Propagation of Amorphophallus by Leaf Petiole Cuttings — Juniper Level Botanic Garden
6. iNaturalist: Amorphophallus muelleri
7. Amorphophallus Blume ex Decaisne (Araceae - Thomsonieae) in Java. Reinwardtia 13(1): 1-12