The plant arrived in a plastic sleeve from a grower in Tarapoto, three leaves and a stub of stem, and for the first eighteen months it told me almost nothing. The leaves came out heart-shaped and matte, a little puckered, the petioles too short for the blades. I had bought it as Philodendron verrucosum, and I half-believed the seller, but there was no velvet yet, no red abaxial, no bristled petiole. The plant was a child. It had no reason to show me what it would become.
Aroids keep their adulthood in reserve. A seedling Monstera deliciosa does not fenestrate. A young Anthurium warocqueanum has none of the lacquered length that makes a mature leaf look forged rather than grown. To read where an aroid sits on its arc — juvenile, intermediate, adult, reproductive — you have to learn the small grammar of cataphylls, internodes, petiole sheaths and leaf shape change. Once you can read it, a shelf of look-alike heart leaves becomes legible, and a lot of mislabeling sorts itself out without an argument.