Philodendron 'Tangerine'

Where it comes from

Nobody has written it down. This is the thinnest record of any plant on the site, and saying so precisely is more useful than filling the space.

What was searched, and what came back empty: Kew’s Plants of the World Online and IPNI both return no results for the name;¹² the International Aroid Society’s cultivar registry — the international registration authority for Araceae — has no record;³⁴ and a search of US plant patents returns nothing matching, including a separate sweep of orange-foliage philodendron patents.⁵ No breeder, no nursery of origin, no introduction date. The only sources that exist are shops, and they do not agree with each other.

The nearest documented relative gives a sense of what the plant probably is. Philodendron ‘Prince of Orange’ was patented in 1989 — US Plant Patent 6,797, Howard N. Miller — and the patent describes exactly this kind of plant: “new leaves are a glossy, bright orange, and as the leaves mature, they change colour from orange to apricot to yellow-green to pale or medium green”, on “a compact self-heading plant … a true rosette”.⁶ Two shops call ‘Tangerine’ a cultivar of ‘Prince of Orange’; another calls it their own new hybrid. Nothing above shop copy decides it.

Worth knowing before assuming a species: ‘Prince of Orange’ is not a cultivar of one. Its patent gives a parentage compounded from P. domesticum, P. erubescens, P. wendlandii, P. imbe and P. cannifolium.⁶ The Florida self-heading philodendrons are multi-species hybrids, so “it is a P. erubescens cultivar” is a guess even when it sounds like taxonomy.

Naming and description

‘Tangerine’ is a cultivar name — single quotes, no species, because no species is documented. That is the honest rendering rather than a placeholder.

The plant is self-heading: a rosette that builds a short thick stem rather than climbing, so it wants floor or shelf space rather than a pole. New leaves open orange and pass through apricot and yellow-green to green as they harden, which means a healthy plant carries several colours at once and an established one looks quite different from the photograph that sold it.

Descriptions vary more than they should for one plant — five shops give four accounts, from “brilliant, glowing orange-bronze” to “light-green leaves with tangerine hues” — so expect the plant to be less saturated than the listing. One shop gives a mature size of about 24 inches; no other source gives a figure at all.

Fun facts

• The orange is not a pigment display so much as a leaf that has not finished being built. A new leaf arrives with very little chlorophyll — in one study of delayed-greening species, young leaves held as little as 0.09 mg/g — while carrying anthocyanins that the small amount of chlorophyll cannot mask.⁷ Green arrives as the proplastids mature into working chloroplasts.⁸ The colour fades because the leaf is switching on, not because the plant is losing something.
• The obvious explanation for why it does that is not settled. The tidy story is that anthocyanin is sunscreen for tissue that cannot yet photosynthesise — and the study above looked for that effect and did not find enough of it to account for the flush.⁷ Worth knowing before repeating the version every plant blog gives.
• Nothing here has a registration, and that is the ordinary case. No patent, no ICRA entry, no botanical record — for a plant sold in every third shop. The International Aroid Society does register aroid cultivars and its registry works;³ almost nobody in the houseplant trade uses it. A name on a label is a marketing decision, and treating it as an identification is the single most common mistake in this hobby.