Somewhere in the western cordillera of Colombia, at elevations where the cloud sits in the canopy for most of the morning and the temperature rarely climbs above 20 °C, Anthurium warocqueanum grows as an epiphyte on mossy trunks with its roots wrapped in perpetual, oxygenated moisture. The leaves hang vertically — sometimes past a metre — dark green shading to near-black, the primary and secondary venation silvered as if someone had pressed platinum wire into living tissue. In the forest, all the conditions conspire in its favour. In your growing room in January, they conspire against you.
That tension is the whole story of warocqueanum in cultivation. No other aroid — possibly no other houseplant — commands the price, the patience, and the grief that this species does. Collectors who keep ten-leaf specimens speak with the quiet authority of people who have survived something. Those who have lost one speak with equal authority, only darker. The Queen, as the hobby calls her, has been earning that epithet since Victorian horticulturists first displayed her in Belgian glasshouses, and she has not become more forgiving in the intervening century and a half.