Its name is a mouthful, but its beauty is compelling. Anthurium is a flower designed to get maximum attention. It seems Mother Nature turns mad inventor when she goes to work in dark crowded jungles. In the steamy thickness of South American rain forests, she hatched this eye-catching genus.

It's a heart on a stick. Or, to put it another way, a brilliantly colored flag mounted on a long smooth rod.

When cut, the flower slides easily into a vase, tilts its face gracefully toward the world, and then persists, shiny and fresh, for an amazingly long time—two months or more. Not only that, each flower comes with a long spike, a goofy snout, which triggers the imaginary sensation that anthuriums have faces.

A botanist sees the anthurium this way: the actual "flower"—technically an inflorescence or cluster of flowers—is that snout. It's properly called a spadix. This fleshy cylinder is coated with minuscule flowers, usually cream colored but sometimes green, red, purple, even black. Most of the time this spadix is straight or slightly bowed. In at least one species, the spadix corkscrews. If any of the flowers is pollinated, the spadix will form berries that swell into warty knobs.

The flag of color is actually a bract -- a single, highly specialized leaf that botanists call the spathe. Obviously, the spathe is an advertisement, a kind of billboard to promote the inflorescence. It serves the same natural function as a peacock's spread tail. Spathes are deeply saturated with color (pink, red, purple, white, and green are common shades) and are typically so thick and glossy that they seem to have been cut out of vinyl. Anthurium spathes are usually heart-shaped and solid in color. However, "obake" types blend green with some other color. "Tulip" types are not heart-shaped but gently curved like… well, like a tulip.

Arums as a class are not native to Hawai`i, certainly not anthuriums. But anthuriums are such a significant part of Hawai`i's cut-flower industry that they now seem to be emblems of the Aloha spirit. The credit for this floricultural match goes largely to the University of Hawai`i's college of tropical agriculture, which developed techniques for hybridizing these odd flowers. Through its cooperative extension service, the university is continuously releasing new cultivars bred for disease resistance, high yield, and sumptuous colors.

Examples include the glowing white of “Hilo Moon”; the screaming red of “Waimea”; and the deep green (fading to cream) of the 10-inch-long “Mauna Loa.” By the way, high yield for an anthurium plant can mean as few as six blossoms a year. But these flowers are so sturdy that they last and last. Even after it is cut, a “Mauna Loa” flower enjoys an amazing 56-day vase life..

Without a doubt, the anthurium-growing capital of Hawai`i is Hilo on the Big Island. Floral Resources/Hawai`i, Inc. is a typical Hilo operation that sells cut flowers to the U.S. Mainland and Japan. The company has 35 acres dedicated to anthurium production. Plants grow directly in volcanic cinder under 80 percent shadecloth. Each shadehouse covers 2.5 acres. Although each plant produces only six flowers a year, plants are grown at such a density that each shadehouse yields 375,000 flowers annually.
Being jungle plants, anthuriums like the same temperature range that we do—"room temperature." So they make good houseplants. However, most houses are arid as a desert, and anthuriums need high humidity as well as protection from direct sunlight. It takes some ingenuity to find the right situation indoors—in the bathroom, or on a tray of wet gravel, or even under a transparent cover. Ideally, the leaves get misted several times a day.

These plants are epiphytes, meaning they grow naturally above the soil on tree limbs. So the potting medium should be porous and coarse. In Hawai`i people use wood shavings, tree fern chips, macadamia nut shells, cinder, or even bagasse, the byproduct of sugarcane crushing. An easy home recipe is a 1:1:1 ratio of peat, perlite, and bark. A mild application of liquid fertilizer every two weeks is sufficient. The main challenge is to achieve humidity and light without exposing the leaves to blasting solar radiation.
Home gardeners who find the right niche for these flowers run the risk of becoming arum fanatics. There are 5,000 species of anthurium, most of which have insignificant flowers. But, wow, the foliage!

For more information, you can visit www.aroid.org /TAP/ and view the online book called The Anthurium Primer by Neil Carroll. You'll see anthuriums that look like birds nests, ones with frilly or "fraffle" leaves, even one with six-foot-long leaves that hang out of their pots like fantastic tongues. If you're not careful, you could turn into an "aroider," like the ones who list themselves on the International Aroid Society's website.

With its peacock-feather display, here’s one flowering plant that really stands up and says, “Look at me!” Give this Hawaiian transplant half a chance, and heart-shaped anthurium will capture the hearts of plant-lovers everywhere.