Anthurium pedatoradiatum

Where it comes from

Southern Mexico, and nowhere else. Kew gives three regions — Gulf, Southeast and Southwest Mexico — and glosses them as southern Mexico;¹ the states only appear a rank down, on the pages for its two subspecies, which between them cover southern Veracruz, Oaxaca, Chiapas and Tabasco.²³ Worth noting because the list repeated in the trade — Veracruz, Tabasco, Chiapas — leaves Oaxaca out.

The habit matters more than the range, and here the databases and the monographer disagree. Kew’s lifeform field says epiphyte, in the seasonally dry tropical biome.¹ Croat’s treatment, written from the specimens, says terrestrial, on rocky limestone slopes, in tall evergreen forest — and uses the terrestrial habit as a character separating the subspecies.⁴ A generated lifeform field against a monographer’s field description is not a close call, and the two answers point at opposite potting decisions. Treat it as a ground plant. Altitude runs from near sea level to about 800 m for the typical subspecies and to 1,400 m for the other.⁵

No conservation assessment turned up — not on Kew’s record, not on the IUCN list. “Not assessed as far as I can establish” is the honest statement rather than Least Concern.

Naming and description

Anthurium pedatoradiatum Schott, published in Bonplandia in 1859.¹⁶ IPNI records the original spelling with a hyphen — pedato-radiatum — which is the compound laid bare: pedate, meaning divided like a bird’s foot, and radiate, spreading from a point.⁶ I could not reach Schott’s own text to see whether he explains it, so read that as what the name is built from rather than as what he said about it.

A mature leaf is cut nearly to the base into finger-like segments: up to thirteen in the typical subspecies, seven to eleven in the other.⁴⁵ The blade is wider than it is long, 22–33 cm by 38–60 cm, on petioles of 35–87 cm, and the plant usually exceeds a metre in habitat.⁴

‘Fingers’ is a descriptive trade name, not a cultivar. The International Aroid Society is the registration authority for Araceae and lists seventeen registered Anthurium cultivars, none of them this;⁷⁸ the RHS holds only the species, with “fingers anthurium” recorded as a common name.⁹ So write it as the species. Retailers style it as though it were a cultivar; it is a nickname.

Fun facts

• The finger leaf is convergent, not inherited — and the paper that shows it also threw this species out of the group it was named for. Croat and Carlsen’s 2013 revision folded section Schizoplacium into Dactylophyllium and, in the same work, used molecular data to exclude A. pedatoradiatum from it, placing it instead with northern Central American species and corroborating that with its bright orange, mealy-fleshed berries.¹⁰ Its resemblance to the other finger-leaved anthuriums is a coincidence of shape. Note that the aroid society’s own pages still file it under the pre-2013 placement.
• Nobody knows what the divided leaf is for. It is tempting to reach for the Monstera fenestration literature — the sunfleck argument, or the programmed cell death that makes the holes — but neither addresses Anthurium, and a search of the literature for any functional account of a divided anthurium leaf comes back empty.¹¹¹²¹³ A striking leaf with no published explanation is a more interesting thing to say than a borrowed one.
• The plant you buy is not the plant on the label. A juvenile leaf is far simpler than the mature one, so a young plant looks like a different species and stays that way for some time. How long is not something any source gives — the best answer available is “over a series of healthy growth cycles”.¹⁴ That the shape changes is well attested by growers; nothing at the taxonomic level documents the juvenile leaf of this species at all.