Imagine a plant that refuses to sit in a pot on a windowsill and look decorative. Anthurium vittarifolium does not do that. Its leaves — narrow, ribbon-like, sometimes exceeding a metre in length — hang straight down from a rosette that grips its host tree ten metres off the Amazonian forest floor. The inflorescence, when it comes, is a modest spadix. The aftermath is not modest at all: a column of berries that ripens to hot pink, almost fluorescent, strung like a wet bead curtain against the descending foliage. In a collection of rare aroids, it is the plant people stop at and ask what it is.
There is a category of collector — you know the type — who pursues velvets and windows and silver venation, who measures a leaf's sinus depth and photographs new growth before it finishes unfurling. Vittarifolium attracts a slightly different obsessive: someone drawn to form rather than surface, to silhouette and scale, to the question of how you suspend a living chandelier in a room with eight-foot ceilings and make it work. The answer, it turns out, involves a decent hanging basket, a lot of sphagnum, and a willingness to let the plant define the space rather than the other way around.