Anthurium 'Queen of Hearts'

Where it comes from

A Florida nursery, and past that the record stops. Sellers consistently credit it to Silver Krome Gardens and to William Rotolante, who named it.¹² Nothing above that tier mentions the plant at all: not Kew, not the International Aroid Society’s registry, not Exotic Rainforest, and not either of the long specialist surveys of velvet and pebbled anthuriums — one of which discusses its putative parent at length and never names it.³

It is not registered, and that negative is unusually solid. The registry serves records for accepted, rejected and pending cultivars alike — its pages for ‘Ace of Spades’ and ‘Jack of Clubs’ resolve, and so does one for a name it rejected — while the equivalent page for this cultivar simply does not exist.⁴⁵⁶ It was never submitted. There is a wrinkle there worth enjoying: Bill Rotolante is both the breeder credited with naming this plant and the registrar the International Society for Horticultural Science lists for Araceae,⁷ and he registered ‘Jack of Clubs’ with full parentage in 2021.⁵ The gap is not for want of knowing how.

How it arose is contested three ways, all of them retail copy. One account has it a hybrid seedling of ‘Ace of Spades’ × ‘Red Leaf’ that turned up as a tissue-culture accident;⁸ another has it a spontaneous tissue-culture sport, which is a different event entirely;⁹ a third names the origin and declines to guess the parentage.¹ A seedling and a sport cannot both be true. Compounding it, ‘Ace of Spades’ is itself registered as a select form of an unknown jungle-collected plant,⁴ so even the alleged parent has no documented parentage.

Naming and description

The “Queen” is borrowed. The true Queen Anthurium is Anthurium warocqueanum T.Moore, described in 1878 from Colombia — a pendent epiphyte with strap-shaped blades approaching a metre.¹⁰¹¹ This is a compact plant with rounded, heart-shaped leaves, and nothing connects the two.

What the name actually belongs to is a playing-card series out of the same nursery. The registry records ‘Jack of Clubs’ as named after a playing card for its club-like leaf shape, and ‘Ace of Spades’ for the colour and shape of its foliage.⁵⁴ A heart-shaped leaf gets the hearts card. That is the whole derivation, and it is a better story than the borrowed royalty.

On the leaf itself: velvety or leathery, dark, with deep prominent veins.¹¹² It belongs with the dark velvet anthuriums rather than the pebbled ones — a distinction worth holding on to, because the two groups look similar in a photograph and the pebbled plants are a different thing entirely. Every plant in the trade is a clone.²

Fun facts

• The registrar did not register it. The man credited with naming this plant is the registrar the ICRA system lists for the whole arum family,⁷ and he has used that registry for other plants from the same nursery in the same series.⁵ Which is a fair measure of how optional cultivar registration is in this trade: even the person running it does not always bother.
• Two incompatible origin stories are circulating as fact. A hybrid seedling is a cross between two plants; a sport is one plant mutating. Sellers state each with equal confidence.⁸⁹ Where a plant has no registration, the origin story is whatever the last listing said, and the confident tone is not evidence.
• Everything the genus does badly, this one does too. There is no species-specific care information because there is no species — so what applies is the genus: bacterial blight that can sit latent for months in a new plant and spreads across a wet leaf,¹³ and roots that carry a velamen and suffocate in a dense mix.¹⁴ See the Anthurium care defaults; there is nothing this plant is documented to want differently.