Anthurium forgetii

Anthurium forgetii has circulated in horticulture wrapped in mystery — scarce information, an enigmatic species, even the claim that Kew's plant-names index does not recognize the name. The record needs none of that. I'm Dr. Tapley, a physician and amateur botanist just trying to tell myth from reality in my own large collection. Here is what the record actually holds.

What the record actually says

Anthurium forgetii N.E.Br. was described by Nicholas Edward Brown and published in the Gardeners' Chronicle in 1906. The name is recorded in IPNI and accepted in Kew's Plants of the World Online — the same authorities the old post claimed had rejected it. The epithet honors the plant's collector, M. Forget — IPNI's record of the name carries the remark "Named after collector Monsieur Forget" — though the record tells us little more about him than the name itself. Brown described the species from a plant already in cultivation; it was attributed to Colombia, to the Andes at roughly 1,100 meters.

Here is the honest gap, and it is a real one: because the species entered science through a cultivated plant rather than a documented wild collection, the collection data for that described plant — its exact locality, and habitat notes of the kind most species descriptions carry — was never recorded. A name can be perfectly valid while its documented origin is thin. That is the situation here, and it is commoner in the old cultivated-plant literature than mystery-writing suggests.

Telling it from crystallinum — the sinus

The confusion that follows this plant around is with Anthurium crystallinum, another velvet-leaf species with pale venation. The reliable structural difference is at the top of the leaf blade, where the two rear lobes meet. In A. crystallinum, that junction — the sinus — is open: the lobes leave a visible notch. In A. forgetii, the sinus is effectively absent: the blade's lobes overlap or fuse so the leaf presents as a closed, oval shield with no notch at all. If you are handed a "forgetii" with a clearly open sinus, look again — that single character settles most of the argument, and it is a more trustworthy test than vein brightness, which varies with light and leaf age.

The leaf itself

The blades are oval to elliptic, velvety, and dark green with paler venation — handsome, but I will describe them the way I would want them described to me: the contrast is present, not theatrical, and young leaves differ from mature ones. The petiole — the stalk carrying the blade — is nearly round in cross-section, without a groove down its face, just as Brown's original description has it. When the plant flowers it does what anthuriums do: a spathe, green, around a central spadix that shifts in color as it matures through its female and male phases.

One detail from the old post I am deliberately not repeating: a precise berry color and seed count for this species. I could not verify it against the original description or a modern treatment, and a number I cannot source does not go in — that is the standard this whole series is being rebuilt to.

Why this plant, honestly

A. forgetii does not need a legend. It is a compact, closed-shield velvet leaf from the Colombian Andes whose paper trail runs through a 1906 horticultural journal instead of a herbarium expedition — a reminder that some of the plants in our collections arrived through gardens, not fieldwork, and that a thin collection record for the described plant is not a gap in the record. It is the record.