Alocasia micholitziana 'Frydek'

Where it comes from

Unlike the philodendron hybrids here, this one has a described species behind it and a range on record. Kew accepts Alocasia micholitziana Sander, published in The Gardeners’ Chronicle in 1912, and gives its native range as the Philippines, on Luzon — one island, which is a good deal more precise than the “Southeast Asia” the hobby tends to repeat. Kew lists no synonyms.¹ It grows in montane forest at roughly 1,200 to 1,500 metres,¹ which is cooler and more even than the lowland tropics and fits its reputation for disliking hot, dry rooms.

‘Frydek’ is a cultivar of that species, and everything about the cultivar happened in cultivation. Which came first is contested. This page used to say the variegated form was a sport of a green ‘Frydek’; the most detailed account I could find — a hobby reference, unsourced at the primary level — has it the other way round: the plain green plant was named ‘Green Velvet’ in the 1980s and later sold as ‘Maxkowskii’, and the name ‘Freydyk’ was first attached in the late 1990s to a variegated plant, then misspelled into ‘Frydek’ by a tissue-culture lab.² The RHS independently lists A. micholitziana ‘Freydyk’ as a variegated plant.³ Nothing I could open settles it, so take the dates as reported.

Naming and description

micholitziana honours Wilhelm Micholitz, the collector who worked for the Sander nursery that published the species — which is why the species name and the publisher’s name go together.⁴ The fuller account, came a year later in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine.⁴

The plain plant is worth describing first: deep matt green, so dark it reads as black in poor light, with a texture closer to velvet than to leaf and bright white main veins running out to each lobe. It is smaller and more upright than its reputation suggests — about half a metre, carrying four to seven leaves at a time.¹

The variegated form adds sectors of cream to pale green, distributed unpredictably: whole halves of a leaf on some, fine marbling on others. Like the Monstera albo, this is variegation carried in cell layers rather than a pattern the plant reproduces faithfully, so no two leaves match and a division can inherit more or less of it than the plant it came from.⁵

Fun facts

• The velvet is structure, not pigment. The upper skin of a velvet leaf is made of domed, lens-shaped cells that focus incoming light down into the leaf instead of bouncing it back, which is what makes the surface look matt and deep and the veins look lit. That was measured in rainforest shade plants including a velvet-leaf anthurium, and it only reads as velvet when the leaf is dark to begin with.⁶⁷ Water left sitting on the leaf tends to leave marks; why is not something I could find a source for.
• Variegated tissue is a cost here more than on most plants. An alocasia already runs a demanding plant on a handful of leaves at a time, and cream tissue photosynthesises little. A heavily variegated one is doing the same job on a fraction of the leaf it appears to have.⁸
• Dormancy is not decline — but it is not automatic either. The genus ranges from seasonally dormant to evergreen;⁹ in a cool, dark winter a plant may drop its leaves and rest on its thick underground stem — a rhizome, not the corm the hobby calls it — and grow back from the base when warmth returns.¹⁰¹¹ The RHS lists ‘Freydyk’ as evergreen, which is what it will be in a warm, bright room. Either way, the plant that looks dead in November is usually fine underground — see the Alocasia care defaults and the general plant care page for what to do and, mostly, what not to.
• It is toxic and can hurt. All parts carry calcium oxalate crystals: painful if eaten, and an irritant to skin and eyes.³¹²