Saturday, February 24, 2007

Do you have Elephant's Ears?



Costa Rica is the source of these Colocasia or Elephant's Ears tubers, reassuringly labelled as from a sustainable source. This will be my second attempt at growing them, last years tubers which were half the size and twice the price of these specimens simply rotted in their pots. Even amongst the consignment I selected these two bulbs from there was evidence of mould on some of the tubers.

Planted out of the wind the Elephant's Ears should provide an exotic keynote in this years display. I would like to have a tropical garden but gardening for us, both in cool and windy north eastern England and hot and even more windy north east Spain, means that large leaved plants can be something of a liability. So we will try to create a corner of the garden where our more exotic plants can flourish.

6 comments:

  1. Interesting plant. Looks familiar but never heard of the name.

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  2. What an exoticlooking plant...the tubers look huge. We call Bergenias "elephants ears"

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  3. Anonymous5:47 pm

    Your the second blog I recently read that had a post about Elephant's Ears...have to plant some this year.

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  4. You can actually buy some tubers at the grocery store or west indian market. Some of the varieties sold for ornamental plants are the same as the edible ones, known as eddoes, colocsia, dasheen.

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  5. They do look stunning at their full height of about 5'0". I think the Grocery store idea is a good one, I think I read that they are also known as Tarro.

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  6. Yes, Taro ( Hawaii) is dasheen ( West Indies). The tubers are cooked and eaten and the leaves are used to make the famous callaloo soup. The smaller types are eddoes or colocasia, and also tannia, but I don't think leaves are eaten from these.

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