Alocasia wentii
A small, rarely collected Alocasia of primary and secondary forest in the mountains of central New Guinea, with dark green, arrow-shaped leaves. The large purple-backed plant sold everywhere as 'Alocasia wentii' is almost certainly a sterile garden hybrid, not this species, so check what you actually have before copying these conditions. The true species comes from cool, very wet highland forest at roughly 1,000–1,900 m.
Where it grows wild
A terrestrial herb of the forest floor in primary and secondary montane rainforest. Herbarium labels come from the Star Mountains and the Hindenburg Range in the upper Sepik and Fly headwaters of Papua New Guinea, and from Mount Hellwig in the central ranges of Indonesian Papua. Like most small highland Alocasia it probably grows in humus-rich soil on slopes and in gullies under a closed canopy.
Only the two 1912 Mount Hellwig specimens carry an elevation, about 1,900 m. The Star Mountains and Hindenburg Range sites lie in very wet lower-montane forest, probably around 1,000–2,000 m. This is an estimate, not a measurement.
🔒 Growing it like that
The wild conditions above, turned into targets for a shelf, a tent or a greenhouse. The full profile has:
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More Alocasia
Profiles are drafts built from measured range and climate and from published sources; each section carries its own confidence in the app.