Philodendron 'Florida Ghost'

Where it comes from

A hybrid with parents rather than a range. Both species behind the ‘Florida’ line are well documented — Kew accepts Philodendron pedatum, from across northern and central South America, and Philodendron squamiferum, from French Guiana, Suriname and northern Brazil¹² — but the cross itself is not.

The usual account is that ‘Florida’ came out of Robert McColley’s breeding programme at Bamboo Nursery in Apopka, Florida, as P. squamiferum × P. pedatum. The programme itself is documented: it ran from the 1960s and produced several familiar self-heading hybrids, and it appears in a plant patent and a horticultural review.³⁴ Neither document mentions ‘Florida’ or that cross, though; the attribution lives in nursery and forum sources, and one long-time aroid grower doubts the parentage outright.⁵ Whether P. laciniatum — now a synonym of P. pedatum⁶ — was involved under its old name is one of the details nobody can settle.

‘Florida Ghost’ is a sport of ‘Florida’ — a mutation found on that hybrid and propagated for what its new leaves do — rather than a separate cross.⁷

Naming and description

The ‘Florida’ cultivars are a cluster rather than a family tree: ‘Florida Ghost’, ‘Florida Beauty’ and ‘Florida Bronze’ share a look and a climbing, lobed-leaf habit, and are grouped by what they resemble more than by any confirmed pedigree. Reading them as siblings with a known parent is reading more into the names than the records support.

What sets this one apart is the new growth. A leaf unfurls creamy white — the ghost — and greens over the following weeks as its chloroplasts mature and chlorophyll fills in; in brighter light the leaves come out paler and stay pale longer.⁷⁸ It is not variegation and it does not persist. A plant with several pale leaves at once is a plant growing quickly, not a plant with a stable pattern: ‘Florida Beauty’ has chimeral variegation that stays; the ghost is a phase.

The petioles carry a faint roughness from the squamiferum side, where the petioles are covered in small spreading scales that read as bristles.⁹ Here it is far less pronounced.

Fun facts

• The white is temporary, and that is the whole plant. Every ‘Florida Ghost’ leaf ends up green. What varies between plants is how long the pale phase lasts and how many leaves are in it at once, and both follow light and growth rate rather than anything about the plant’s quality.⁷
• It is slower than its parents. New leaves with little chlorophyll cannot pull their weight while they are pale, so the cultivar grows more slowly than either species behind it⁷ — do not expect hybrid vigour. Mature leaves still reach thirty centimetres.
• The lobes arrive with maturity. Juvenile leaves are far simpler than the five-lobed shape the plant is sold on, so a young one looks like a different and much duller plant. Give it something to climb; that is the general rule for climbing philodendrons rather than a measured fact about this one.