Alocasia mutation. LariAnn U will want to see this

Well I went to visit a good friend today who runs a nursery down the street from us. He is going to grow out a lot of my hybrids during the winter sense he has a ton more room than I do during the winter months. While their his wife said he should show me his odd mutant seedling they called it off of the common upright Macrorrhizas we have here. I believe it was self pollinated and this one was just a odd ball out of it.

It was a strange looking plant and the leaves acutally cup up almost like spaths off of other aroids with out the spadix.

The strangest part of this I think is that LariAnn years ago had a similar hybrid or mutation I believe called pixie? That looked exactly like this I believe it was off of a Odora. The mother plant this was off of was around 3 feet tall with small trunks. It looks like it will stay fairly small similar to cucullata.

LariAnn when I first saw it I was shocked at how it looked exactly like your old cross. Amazing.

Closer look at the leaves.

Brian, that does indeed look like a Pixie! At this time, I have a Pixie that came from a hybridization involving Alocasia brisbanensis (you might remember seeing it when you were here), so now I know of three different crosses with different species that yielded Pixies. I would love to have a DNA test done as I suspect these Pixies are polyploids, or plants with spontaneous doubling of chromosomes. They might have even higher ploidy than tetraploid; perhaps pentaploid or heptaploid. Of course, that would probably indicate sterility; I have never seen any Pixies bloom even though I grew them till they had nice little trunks on them.

I believe that if you grow off enough seed, you will eventually find a Pixie showing up in the progeny. I'm wondering if I'll ever see a Pixie with colored leaves.

Thanks for sharing this find, Brian!

I don't think this is the same mutation. But this I have found interesting it is usually found in TCed plants aparently fairly rare maybe the more copies they make the higher the chances. This is a mutated Alocasia plumbea. The stems were dark and so were the leaves but highly mutated

This is almost the same mutation but this is on a Pink Flamingo Alocasia. I believe it goes by the name aroura here in the US.

This is similar but not as far mutated. I have asked the grower of this plant to put it into TC or at least propagate it. It could be a interesting plant to breed with. But so far the plant is still in it's pot. I believe this looks similar to one called crinkles a mutation off of cucullata.

Those last three look to me like too much genetic distortion and I would not choose to attempt breeding with them. I do like working with interesting leaf shapes like the A. advincula, but the three plants pictured above don't look like they would be viable as breeding parents.

All three look to me like a similar mutation to that which produced the Alocasia trangularis; see this link:

http://www.agristarts.com/aloc_triangularis.htm

I wouldn't breed with that one either!