Hold a mature leaf of Anthurium papillilaminum up to a raking sidelight and the surface stops being a leaf. It becomes topography. The puckering between each lateral vein pulls the blade into a series of raised panels, each one slightly convex, so that the light catches and drops away across the whole plane in a slow oscillation of shadow. You are looking at a few hundred square centimeters of plant material, and it reads like aerial photography of a plowed field.
This quality — called bullation, from the Latin bulla, a bubble or stud — is not unique to anthuriums. Savoy cabbage has it. So do some hoyas and certain Philodendron gloriosum forms. But no genus has weaponized it quite the way Anthurium has, and nowhere on earth has evolution pressed it further than in the cloud forests of Ecuador and the adjacent Colombian Andes, where a cluster of velvet-leaved, deeply quilted species grows in conditions that most collectors spend years trying to simulate.