Giant Elephant Ears and much more

The Giant Elephant Ear, Colocasia gigantea, also known as Indian Taro or Thailand Giant, is from valley forests in China and other parts of South-east Asia (not as far as I know, originally from India).

Its leaves can be two metres long and almost as wide. A cultivar called 'Thailand Giant Strain' is said to produce the largest leaves in cultivation.

We grow the species all over Melbourne Gardens, but the best specimen is in our Southern China Collection, in the garden bed near the Director's Honour Roll (where the names of the thirteen heads of Royal Botanic Garden Victoria are etched into concrete).

It's grown mostly for the enormous leaves but, as Neville Walsh said as we passed by it the other day, there is a lot to be impressed by. The crinkled new leaves are wrapped tightly like a unfurled flag for starters. 

Then the flowers, out when we saw it in late summer, like a shy Calla Lily (Zantedeschia), all lined up in a neat row. The flower on the left in the next picture has its spadix (the centre of the collective flower, carrying the fertile florets with female at the top, males at the bottom) dangling out from the spadix (the shielding bract).

And then, those big leaves, here offset against a nearby giant bunya pine

That's all without eating it. In its native habitats, the leaf stems are eaten as a vegetable by people, or fed to pigs. In Japan it can be part of soup, stir fry or sushi. There is another alleged risqué use for the leaf stem which I'll leave you to google.

Although one common name includes the word taro, the underground stem (or tuber) is apparently stringy and inedible. 

The botanical name is interesting. Not so much the species epithet which simply refers to the large size of the plant, but the genus name, which is based on the Ancient Greek word 'kolokasia'. Kolokasia was used by the Greeks for the tuber of the lotus, Nelumbo nucifera. 

So how did that word end up in the genus name for the elephant-ear genus, Colocasia? Probably thanks to one of the 20 or so species, Colocasia esculenta, the edible taro. It's likely that the Greeks - including the physician and botanist Disocorides. writing in the first century - use the same word for the underground parts of the taro and the lotus.

Our 'not-lotus' might look like it needs a decent amount of water, which it does, but also a well drained soil. If you have a spare square metre or two of space, and ready source of irrigation, to give it a go.