Alocasia scalprum

Where it comes from

Kew says the Philippines, and specifically Samar — island-level precision, which is more than POWO usually offers.¹ Read the description behind it, though, and the wording is softer: Hay writes that the species is said to be known only from Samar.² Philippine specialists report it from Leyte, Dinagat, Surigao and Mindanao as well.³ Somewhere between “a single-island endemic” and “eastern Philippines” is the truth, and nobody has settled it.

That is because — and this is the fact the rest of the page hangs from — no wild specimen of this plant exists. Hay is explicit: it is well known in cultivation in the Philippines, and is not represented by any wild-collected herbarium material.² The holotype is a plant that had been growing in the Munich Botanic Garden since 1983, collected there by Josef Bogner with its origin recorded as unknown.⁴²

So the habitat field in the description is one word: “Unknown.”² No substrate, no altitude, no forest type. If you find a page telling you this is a limestone plant that wants a particular elevation, that page invented it — I looked, and there is nothing to find.

Naming and description

Alocasia scalprum A.Hay, published in Gardens’ Bulletin Singapore 51: 30 (1999), within his revision of the Philippine members of the genus.¹⁴ No synonyms. One widely-read specialist page credits the description to Bogner in 1984; both halves are wrong — Bogner collected the type, Hay named the species fifteen years later.⁵

Scalprum is Latin for a chisel or knife, and Hay says why he chose it: the blade is knife-shaped.² It is a narrow, slightly curved lance, 15–25 cm long and only 2–5 cm wide, on a petiole of about 10 cm that is shorter than the leaf itself.² The veins are deeply impressed above and raised beneath, two or three primary laterals each side, which gives the quilted look.

Two corrections to what gets repeated. The margin is not wavy: the description says entire and slightly revolute — rolled under, not undulating.² And the famous thick, leathery texture appears nowhere in the botanical description, which uses no texture word at all.² Growers are consistent that the leaf is stiff and dark with a blue cast, new leaves emerging paler,⁶⁷ so believe it — just know it is an observation and not a measurement, and that nobody has explained why the leaf is built that way.

Fun facts

• The type specimen is a houseplant. Botany’s reference plant for this species is a pot that sat in a Munich glasshouse from 1983, with no record of where it came from, named in 1999 from that.⁴² Every formal statement about the species traces to that plant.
• Horticulture beat science to it by fifteen years, and thought it was four plants. It circulated among collectors as Alocasia ‘Samar Lance’ through David Burnett’s 1984 account of cultivated alocasias, which already treated it as several variable selected forms.⁸² Which is a useful thing to know before comparing yours to someone else’s: variation under this name was recorded before the name existed.
• It is a single-island endemic that nobody has assessed. There is no IUCN assessment, and it is absent from the Philippine national threatened-plants list that carries legal protection — a list that does include A. sanderiana, A. micholitziana and A. zebrina.⁹¹⁰ A plant with a contested range, no wild specimen and a place in the houseplant trade has no conservation status at all, which is less an outrage than a demonstration of how much has to happen before something gets one.