Anthurium

Season note

Keep consistently moist during growing season; reduce watering in the cooler, less active winter period.

Overwatering signs

Yellow leaf tips, root rot

Underwatering signs

Brown leaf tips, wilting

Light level

bright indirect

Best rooms

Soil

Well-draining, chunky aroid mix

Humidity

Thrives in high humidity (60–80%)

Fertilizer

Phosphorus-rich fertilizer at quarter strength weekly during growing season for continuous blooms

Temperature range

18°C – 27°C

Anthurium andraeanum, widely sold under common names like flamingo flower, flamingo lily, and painter's palette, is native specifically to the rainforests of Colombia and Ecuador, where it grows in the humid, shaded understorey typical of tropical lowland forests. It belongs to the arum family, Araceae, making it a relative of peace lily, pothos, and philodendron, and it's a winner of the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit, a mark of its horticultural reliability and quality. The genus Anthurium itself is enormous — with well over a thousand described species and an estimated total that may run closer to two thousand — and Colombia in particular is considered the country with the greatest Anthurium diversity in the world, with the Pacific slope of the Andes standing out as an especially biodiverse region for the genus, overlapping with the Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena biodiversity hotspot. New Anthurium species continue to be discovered and formally described in Colombia's remote forest reserves even in recent years, underscoring just how much of the genus's diversity remains only partially catalogued by botanists.

What most people identify as the plant's "flower" is, structurally, something quite different: a modified, waxy, often heart-shaped leaf called a spathe, which surrounds a slender central spike, the spadix, where the plant's true, tiny flowers are actually clustered. This structure is characteristic of the arum family broadly, the same basic arrangement found in peace lily and its relatives, though Anthurium's spathe is typically far more brightly colored and glossy, ranging through red, pink, orange, white, and purple depending on the cultivar, with extensive breeding over the decades having produced an especially wide palette of colors well beyond what's typically seen in the wild species. Anthurium andraeanum flowers essentially continuously under good conditions, and a single well-established plant can produce six to eight new flower stalks per year, a notably prolific flowering habit that has made it a mainstay of the commercial cut-flower trade in addition to its popularity as a potted houseplant.