Colocasia Black Coral

Colocasia Black Coral earns its name plainly: full-grown leaves come in a glossy, near-black so deep and wet-looking that growers have likened it to a slick of oil, with heavy corrugation running out from the base and catching light across every ridge. It's a genuinely documented Colocasia, not just a trade name borrowed for effect, and the plant behind these photos lives up to the reputation.

A Patented Black, Bred by Hawaii's Own Taro Breeder

Black Coral (US Plant Patent 23,896) comes from the breeding program of Dr. John Cho, a taro breeder working in Hawaii, and is sold in the US under Proven Winners' Royal Hawaiian® series. That's a real paper trail few trade-name Colocasia can claim: a named breeder, a patent number, and trial records going back to 2007 at nurseries like Plant Delights. Species-wise it's Colocasia esculenta, the same taro grown across Eastern Asia and the Pacific as a food crop for millennia, selected here purely for how dark and glossy a single leaf can get.

A Blackness With Its Own Sheen, Not Just Depth

What sets Black Coral apart from an ordinary dark Colocasia isn't just how black the leaf gets, it's the finish: a glossy, almost polished surface that catches light differently depending on the angle, brightening to a cool silvery sheen where the light hits a ridge and dropping back to near-solid black in the folds. Heavy corrugation across the blade is what creates that play of light in the first place; a flatter leaf in the same colour wouldn't read nearly as dramatic.

Descended From an Edible Taro, Grown Here for the Leaf

Colocasia esculenta is the same species grown throughout the tropics as taro, a staple root crop in the Pacific and parts of Asia for thousands of years. Black Coral is bred purely for its ornamental leaf rather than the corm, but it's worth knowing the plant comes from working agricultural stock, not a purely decorative lineage invented for the houseplant trade. New leaves on many black Colocasia cultivars, this one included (visible in one of the photos here, a young green leaf still opening alongside the mature black ones), tend to emerge a lighter green before darkening as they mature and harden off.

More Sun and Water Mean a Bigger, Blacker Clump

Black Coral tolerates full sun to part sun, more light than most variegated Colocasia can handle, and rewards it with darker colour and a fuller, more corrugated leaf. Consistent moisture and regular feeding matter more than light does here: elephant ears in general put on the most growth, and the richest colour, when they're never allowed to dry out and are fed steadily through the growing season. In its full patented form it can reach roughly 3.5 feet tall; expect a smaller, more manageable clump from a single fresh cutting until it's had a season or two to establish.

An Affordable Way Into a Documented Cultivar

This cutting ships with bulb and petiole intact, leaves removed for transit and the bulb wrapped in moist sphagnum moss, rather than as the full leafed plant shown in these photos. At this price point, it's one of the more affordable ways into a genuinely patented, well-documented Colocasia cultivar rather than an unverified trade name.

Add Colocasia Black Coral to your collection for a documented, jet-black selection with a genuine breeding history behind it, grown and shipped from ThaiFusion Botanica in Thailand.