Just like pretty much every day, recently my contagious enthusiasm for indoor plants infected a dear friend of mine. Why indoor plants? Well, let me tell you.
We as humans are filthy animals, and we live in disgusting little boxes that have little to no airflow where we constantly bath ourselves in the toxic molecules we surround ourselves with by our modern way of life. Indoor plants can clean things up a bit and make our homes healthier by collecting and metabolizing these chemicals & as a result cleaning the air.
I became curious about studies on the effectiveness of different plant species at cleaning the air, and I was delighted to come across NASA studies. NASA has a heavy interest in the effectiveness of plants at recycling air for use in long space flights, and number 2 on the list of most effective is the Elephant Ear (Philodendron domesticum). In fact the top 2 of the list of 15, and 3 of 15 overall, are from the philodendron genus, which are characterized by their relatively large leaves that the studies show suck up unwanted chemicals during respiration.
Elephant Ear corms (what normal people call Elephant Ear seeds or Elephant Ear bulbs) are readily available in Kansas for about $4 a piece, so my friend and I ventured out to get ours. Corms are interesting things. They differ from bulbs because they’re made up of stems (and not leaves like bulbs are), function to protect the plant during dormancy periods like winter, and have two noticeably different sides. One side is made up of concentric circles, and the other side is rough and bumpy. I did my damndest to illustrate this difference in the picture (above) with the red drawing in the lower right hand corner of the picture of my Elephant Ear corm. The concentric circles are on the left, and the bloblike thing I drew to represent the bumpy side to the right of it. The sides on the picture correspond to the sides on the corm in the picture, and I turned the drawing a bit to make it match the picture better.
It had been a few years since I planted an Elephant Ear, so out of fear of planting it upside down, wasting $4, and the life of a useful plant that had done nothing bad to me, I asked the clerks which end was up. They didn’t know what I was talking about (that's what you get when you don't shop local). I called my Dad, he said, “Hell, I don’t remember.” I looked on the internet, and found nothing conclusive, but I did find an interesting suggestion. Plant the corm on its side and let nature figure it out.
By default, nature knows everything we don’t, so I did what I could to get it to tell me what’s up. The result is the picture at the top. That naughty looking pink thing is a stem, and what it’s growing out of is the top. That looks like a horrible place for it to grow out of if you’re looking for clarity on which end of the corm is up, but it is surely growing from the concentric circle side, and hair-like roots are growing from the other side. So the right side of the picture is down when planted.
CONCLUSION: ELEPHANT EARS ARE TO BE PLANTED CIRCLES UP!
Good luck with the indoor plants and breathing better air.
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