Monstera deliciosa 'Thai Constellation'

Where it comes from

Like the Monstera albo, this is a variegated form of Monstera deliciosa rather than a plant with a range of its own. The species is native to southern Mexico and Guatemala;¹ the cultivar did not arise anywhere in that range.

Beyond that, the origin is undocumented, and the two accounts in circulation contradict each other. One says it was first found in a tissue-culture lab in Thailand;² a grower who has worked with it for years says it was found growing by a Thai roadside in the 1970s and only put into tissue culture in the mid-2000s — multiplied in a lab, not made in one.³ No patent, catalogue or paper settles it: Costa Farms says it cannot be patented because it was already on the market,⁴ and its first trade-press milestone is being voted favourite new foliage plant at the Tropical Plant International Expo in January 2020.⁵ What is not in dispute is that it reaches growers through tissue culture, which is the whole reason it exists in quantity.

Naming and description

‘Thai Constellation’ is a cultivar name — single quotes after the species, not italics — the convention for something selected and propagated by people rather than described from the wild.⁶

The name is a fair description. The variegation comes as cream to pale-yellow flecks scattered across the leaf, dense in places and sparse in others, rather than the clean white blocks the albo produces. Two Thai Constellations look far more alike than two albos do, though heavily multiplied lines drift, and a few recognisable sub-forms circulate under their own trade names.³

The practical difference between the two is stability, and here the story is more interesting than the label. Growers and the two published propagation papers call the pattern stable through tissue culture,⁴⁷ and that is why it can be mass-produced at all. But when Costa Farms tried to produce it by the tens of thousands, it announced in 2022 that “quirks” in tissue culture had stalled the launch indefinitely,⁸ and a Clemson researcher describes scaling it up as a matter of “losing the white”.² Stable enough to mass-produce, then, with effort; not simply stable. Nobody has published the genetics of the variegation — the two papers that exist are about how to culture it, not why it holds⁷ — so treat the mechanism as reported.

Fun facts

• The price collapse is the interesting fact about it. A cultivar that cannot be tissue-cultured stays rare however many people want it, because supply is limited by how fast someone can take cuttings. One that can be is limited only by lab capacity. This plant went from three or four figures to a supermarket price in a few years; the albo, the same species with the same appeal, did not.³
• Cream is not white, and it is not free either. Pale sectors carry less chlorophyll than green ones rather than none — shown in a related aroid, golden pothos⁹ — so the plant is still doing more with less leaf, just more evenly, and rarely to the extreme a half-white albo leaf reaches. It grows more slowly than the plain species for the same reason.⁴
• It fenestrates on the same schedule as the plain species. The holes and splits follow maturity and light, not the variegation, so a young one looks like any other young deliciosa with freckles. The RHS puts it under glass year-round with a minimum of 50–59 °F (10–15 °C).¹⁰