Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Its true flowers are minute and carry no showy parts of their own, crowded by the hundred directly onto a fleshy upright column. The white sail standing behind that column is not a petal but a single modified leaf, and it drifts from pure white through pale green to brown across the four to six weeks it lasts. As the sail withers, the column ripens into a crowded rank of small green berries about 0.15 inch (4 mm) across, one from each of those minute flowers. Every tissue is loaded with needle-shaped {raphide} crystals of calcium oxalate, which burn the mouth and throat of a cat, dog or child that chews a leaf. Each flower on the column carries both stamens and {ovary}, and its stigma is receptive days before that flower's own pollen sheds, so a single spike cannot fertilise itself. It builds no aerial cane and no clinging roots: the leaves rise straight out of a creeping {rhizome} in a stemless clump. It comes from rainforest understorey and streambanks in Colombia and Venezuela, and it will flower in shade dim enough that most flowering plants would not bloom at all. Leathery glossy blades 4 to 10 inches (10 to 25 cm) long and 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 cm) wide, with a distinctly wavy edge, sit on {petiole}s at least as long again. The genus name is Greek for a leaf serving as a hood, naming the modified leaf that stands behind the flowering column. The epithet honours Gustav Wallis, the Lüneburg-born collector who introduced over a thousand plant species to Europe before dysentery killed him at Cuenca in Ecuador in 1878. Let its pot dry out and the whole plant collapses in a theatrical faint, then springs back within hours of watering, and this white-sailed shade-tolerant clump was one of the species NASA tested for stripping formaldehyde, benzene and trichloroethylene from indoor air.

Accepted Answer

Spathiphyllum wallisii

Name That Plant #040