Philodendron 'Ring of Fire'

Where it comes from

Nowhere, in the sense this section usually means. It is a garden hybrid: it has parents rather than a range, and it has never grown wild.

Which parents is a story growers tell each other. The account in circulation is that Keith Henderson made it with Philodendron tortum as the pollen parent and P. wendlandii as the ovule parent. Henderson is real and does hybridise philodendrons — the International Aroid Society’s registry credits him with ‘Splendid’ and ‘Glorious’¹ — but the cross itself is disputed by the person who introduced the plant. The same collector who gives the account elsewhere reports that Barry Yinger disputes it, and that several aroid hybridisers think a tortum cross unlikely.²³

The morphology supports the doubt. Kew has P. wendlandii as a rosette-forming epiphyte with entire leaves, from Nicaragua to Colombia;⁴ P. tortum as a climbing hemiepiphyte with finely divided, almost skeletal leaves.⁵ This plant has neither: a single undivided blade with a deeply toothed edge. The rosette habit fits the wendlandii side. The tortum side is the half nobody can support, and the serrated margin that gets credited to it is not the same character as true division.

There is no patent and no registration with the aroid registry.¹⁶ The introduction through the Pennsylvania nursery Asiatica is only that one collector’s account, though it is the sturdiest part of it — the question was taken to Yinger as the introducer, and what he disputed was the parentage rather than the introduction. Asiatica was in York Haven, Pennsylvania, and closed in autumn 2010,⁷ which at least dates the plant to before then.

Naming and description

‘Ring of Fire’ is a cultivar name — single quotes after the genus, not italicised. No species epithet, on purpose: with the parentage unverified, anything more specific would be an invention.

One correction worth making loudly, because it costs money. ‘Henderson’s Pride’ is not an earlier name for this plant. It is the green, unvariegated sibling — also sold as ‘Jungle Boogie’ and as Tiger Tooth — and it is still on the market at a fraction of the price.⁸⁹ ‘Ring of Fire’ is the variegated selection out of that line. Older forum threads about ‘Henderson’s Pride’ are mostly about the green plant, not about this one under a former name.

The blade is long and narrow and undivided, with a deeply toothed or serrated margin — which is where “Tiger Tooth” comes from. It is not cut into separate segments. Leaves reach about 60 cm on a mature plant.⁸

The colour is two things at once, and the distinction matters. There is permanent cream and yellow variegation, which stays on a hardened leaf. Over that, new growth carries a transient bronze flush that makes the cream read as pink and orange. Costa Farms separates them explicitly: the leaves are splashed with cream and yellow, and as new leaves emerge they carry a bronze tint that makes the new variegation appear pink.⁸ So a finished leaf is green and cream — not plain green.

Habit is self-heading: a rosette when young, leaning and semi-climbing with age.⁹ A plant grown without support is not showing you a juvenile form it will grow out of; that is a legitimate mature shape, reaching about 90 cm across.⁸

Fun facts

• The variegation is real, and the cheap green version proves it. If the colour were only a leaf hardening off, nobody would need a separate name and a separate price for the green plant — but ‘Henderson’s Pride’ exists, sells, and stays green.⁸ A specialist source asked the question directly and answered that the pattern is genetic rather than light-created.⁹
• Treat cuttings as a gamble. No taxonomic or extension source has examined this cultivar’s growing tip, so “chimera” is an inference here rather than a finding. But the reported behaviour is the textbook signature: sectors varying leaf to leaf, reversion to plain green in poor light, and variegation following the cutting.¹⁰¹¹ On that reading a reverted all-green shoot will outgrow the variegated tissue unless it is cut out,¹² which is the opposite of what you would do if the colour were merely developmental.
• Three different wrong parentages circulate. Besides the disputed tortum cross, one widely-read page gives it as P. bipinnatifidum × P. selloum — which Kew records as one species crossed with itself.¹³ When a plant has no registration, the vacuum fills with confident accounts, and this one has filled three times over.
• It is toxic in the ordinary philodendron way. Insoluble calcium oxalates throughout; the ASPCA lists the genus as toxic to dogs, cats and horses, and Clemson describes the clinical picture.¹⁴¹⁵ Severity in practice is usually low: in a poison-centre series of 188 philodendron and dieffenbachia ingestions, four patients showed any symptoms and one of the four was a philodendron.¹⁶ The sap still irritates, so gloves when you are cutting reverted shoots out.