Monstera adansonii

Where it comes from

Most of tropical America. Kew lists it as native from Nicaragua and Costa Rica down through Panamá, Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, across nearly all of Brazil, and out into the Caribbean on Trinidad and the Leeward and Windward Islands.¹ That is a very different kind of range from the single-island plants elsewhere on this site.

It is a hemiepiphyte: it germinates on the forest floor, finds a trunk, climbs, and may eventually lose touch with the ground altogether. A plant on a moss pole is doing the second half of that, which is why it behaves so differently with something to climb than without.

Kew recognises four subspecies — adansonii, blanchetii, klotzschiana and laniata — and the trade ignores the distinction entirely.¹ If provenance matters to you: laniata is the Central American and Amazonian one, so a plant from a Central American nursery line is most likely that; blanchetii is endemic to eastern Brazil and has the most holes; klotzschiana is the widespread Brazilian one with the fewest.²

Naming and description

Heinrich Wilhelm Schott published the name on 23 October 1830, in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Litteratur, Theater und Mode — a Viennese arts and fashion magazine, which is an odd place for a botanical description to live.³ The epithet honours Michel Adanson, and the dedication is tighter than it looks: Adanson is the man who coined the genus name Monstera in 1763, and this species is its type.³⁴

The plant very nearly had a better name. Linnaeus had described it in 1753 as Dracontium pertusum — “pierced” — and by the usual rules that older epithet should have carried over.⁵ It could not, because on the very same page in 1830 Schott had already used Monstera pertusa for a different, Asian plant, now a synonym of Rhaphidophora pertusa.⁶ So Schott knowingly gave Linnaeus’s plant a new epithet instead. When de Vriese tried to use Monstera pertusa for it anyway in 1839, the name was occupied, and Kew records his attempt as an illegitimate later homonym.⁷ The descriptive name was blocked by an unrelated plant; the commemorative one stands.

The leaves are the reason anyone grows it: oval, and perforated with elongated holes between the side veins that stay closed at the margin rather than splitting through to the edge the way M. deliciosa eventually does — a split leaf is what you get when a hole forms close enough to the margin to break through it.⁸ Young leaves are small with two or three modest holes; the fenestration comes with maturity and with something to climb.⁹

Fun facts

• The holes may be a bet on sunflecks. Christopher Muir’s 2013 paper models fenestration across Monstera and argues the holes do not raise a plant’s average growth so much as reduce its variance: a perforated leaf covers a wider area with the same tissue, so it is less at the mercy of exactly where the flecks of sunlight land. The older explanations he reviews — rain drainage, cooling, camouflage from herbivores — either lack evidence or fail to explain why juvenile leaves have no holes. His own is a hypothesis with a test attached, and the test is still waiting.¹⁰
• The holes are made by cells being told to die. They form by programmed cell death in the developing leaf, laid down when the leaf primordium is only a millimetre or two tall, which is why a leaf’s hole count is fixed long before you see it.¹¹¹² What patterns the process is still largely unknown.¹²
• The name on the label is often somebody else’s plant. Narrow and wide forms of this species are sold under each other’s names, and the large, heavily perforated plant sold as ‘Esqueleto’ — long labelled M. epipremnoides — turned out on comparison with the wild species to be something undescribed, closer to M. lechleriana; ‘Esqueleto’ is a placeholder name for it.¹³¹⁴ A seller’s word for what a plant is carries less weight than it sounds.
• It is mildly toxic and can irritate skin. Calcium oxalate crystals throughout; the sap can cause dermatitis, so gloves when cutting.⁹