Elephant ears are grown for their enormous leaves, and many owners never learn the plant can flower at all. A mature, well-grown plant can send up a bloom that looks a lot like a pale calla lily. Getting one depends far more on patience and steady growing conditions than on any single trick.
What the Elephant Ear Flower Looks Like
The bloom is the typical type for the arum family. A white, yellow or light green hood wraps around an upright spike.1Wisconsin Horticulture. Elephant Ears (Colocasia, Alocasia, and Xanthosoma) That’s why it resembles a calla lily or a peace lily, which belong to the same family. The tiny true flowers sit on the spike, with female flowers lower down and male flowers above.
Before it opens, the bud often starts as a narrow, pointed sheath rising from the base among the leaf stalks. New gardeners often mistake it for a new leaf that won’t unroll. A true new leaf unfurls into a flat blade, while the bud stays a tight tube until the hood loosens. Even then the hood opens only partly to reveal the spike, rather than spreading wide like a petal.
A flower stalk is usually thinner than the leaf stalks around it. Colocasia and Alocasia leaf stalks are thick and fleshy, so a slender shoot among them can hint that something different is coming, though it isn’t proof. The surest check is to wait a few days.
Flowers rise from the base of the plant on their own stalks, so look down among the leaf stalks rather than up in the foliage. On a large plant the bloom can sit beneath the canopy, so part the leaves gently or look from the side. Several blooms can appear on one plant in the same season, each on its own stalk.
The show is short. The hood is fresh and pale when it first opens, and a day or so later the upper part of the spike may shed yellowish pollen. The hood then browns, withers and may close back around the spike. The whole thing usually lasts days, not weeks.
It also helps to know which elephant ear you have, since bloom and care advice differ. On Colocasia, the leaf stalk joins near the middle of the leaf’s underside, and the leaves face upward or outward.2Wisconsin Horticulture. Elephant Ears (Colocasia, Alocasia, and Xanthosoma) Alocasia and Xanthosoma leaves usually join at the edge notch and are held more upright.3Wisconsin Horticulture. Elephant Ears (Colocasia, Alocasia, and Xanthosoma)
Why Many Elephant Ears Never Bloom
Age is the main barrier. An elephant ear has to reach maturity before it can flower, which can take 3 or more years in the ground.4Southern Living. How To Grow And Care For Elephant Ears So They Thrive All Summer Long A plant bought or planted this season is unlikely to bloom yet. When blooming does happen, it is usually in spring.5Southern Living. How To Grow And Care For Elephant Ears So They Thrive All Summer Long
Count the seasons the plant has actually grown undisturbed, not the years since you bought it. A plant repeatedly cut back or stored may have restarted its growth many times. A young nursery plant or a freshly divided piece begins as a small corm, so its clock starts over. If yours is in its first or second season, it is most likely just too young.
Garden plants are often held back too. In cold climates many gardeners dig up or cut back the plant each fall, and each restart can set back its progress toward flowering size.
A container matters as well. A small pot limits how big the underground corm or tuber can grow, so a plant kept small in a pot reaches flowering size more slowly. Moving up a pot size gives the roots room to bulk up.
Indoors, an older Alocasia in good light sometimes flowers, but lower light usually means slower growth and fewer blooms. Outdoor plants in warm areas that are never dug up have the best chance.
A plant with no flowers isn’t a sick plant. Big, healthy new leaves are a better sign of good health.
How to Encourage Your Elephant Ear to Flower
Because flowering depends on maturity, the goal is steady growth over several seasons. Keep the soil evenly moist, since elephant ears are heavy drinkers. Check pots often and water when the top of the soil begins to dry. In a bed, mulch holds moisture and keeps the soil from swinging between soaked and bone dry. Colocasia tolerates wetter soil than most Alocasia, which can rot if kept constantly soggy.
Feed with a balanced fertilizer through the growing season, starting once new growth is underway in spring and continuing at regular intervals through summer. It supports the big leaves and the underground growth that lead toward flowering size. Ease off in autumn as growth slows, because a plant heading into dormancy doesn’t need pushing. For light, many Colocasia take sun, while most Alocasia prefer bright shade.
Winter is the other half. Where frost doesn’t reach the ground, leaving the plant in place lets it build size each year. In colder areas, store the dug corm cool and dry, or overwinter the pot indoors, so it isn’t lost. A plant carried over unharmed keeps its progress toward flowering size. Signs that a plant may be nearing flowering size include leaves that get noticeably larger each season, it sends up several stalks or offsets around the base, and the corm you dig up in fall is heavy and large.
Don’t bother with shortcuts. No fertilizer reliably forces a flower on a young plant, and stressing the plant on purpose usually just slows leaf growth.
Why the Flower Can Feel Warm and Smell
Many arum-family flowers make their own heat. In a wild Colocasia relative, the male part of the spike heated to about 42°C (108°F), roughly 17°C (30°F) above the surrounding air.6PubMed. Thermogenesis and flowering biology of Colocasia gigantea, Araceae In Xanthosoma’s native range, this heat helps attract the beetles that pollinate it.7Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. Elephant ear yam Xanthosoma robustum Schott (Araceae), a neglected crop native to Central America
The warmth helps spread the flower’s scent into the air, which makes the bloom easier for insects to find. Once the male stage ends, the heat fades and the bloom begins to wither. A faint smell or warmth near the spike at dawn is part of the flower’s normal behavior.8Thermochimica Acta. Flower ovens: thermal investigations on heat producing plants
To notice it yourself, check the spike early in the morning when the air is cool. Gently touch the base of the hood or hold a hand near the spike. The effect is strongest on the first day or two after opening, and garden plants may show it less clearly than wild ones.
The beetles these flowers evolved with often don’t live where elephant ears are grown, so a garden bloom often fades without forming fruit. If you want seed, you can move pollen between flowers with a small brush.
Seed Pods and What to Do After Blooming
Once pollinated, the flower develops into a fruit cluster full of many small seeds.9Gardening Know How. Seed Pods On Elephant Ear Plants: Do Alocasia Elephant Ears Have Seeds The spent hood withers and the base of the spike swells. The cluster is often partly hidden by the dying hood at first, so you may only see it once the hood has dried back. The seeds turn orange and take months to mature while the pods hang from the plant.10Gardening Know How. Seed Pods On Elephant Ear Plants: Do Alocasia Elephant Ears Have Seeds
While a plant is flowering and making seed, it typically stops putting on new growth.11Gardening Know How. Gardening Know How Cutting off faded flowers and pods saves its energy and lets new leaves come sooner.12Gardening Know How. Gardening Know How Leave them on if you want to collect seeds.13Gardening Know How. Gardening Know How
If you don’t want seed, cut the bloom once the hood has browned and the flower has clearly finished. Waiting a few days lets you enjoy it, and removing it then still comes well before the plant has put much into seed. If you do want seed, leave the stalk until the fruits are fully colored and soft.
Use clean, sharp scissors or pruners, and cut the flower stalk low, near where it emerges, without nicking leaf stalks. Wear gloves, since the sap can irritate skin. Throw the cut flower away rather than leaving it to rot at the base.
Growing from seed is a slow project suited to curious gardeners. Seeds from garden hybrids may not look like the parent plant, while dividing offsets or corms is faster and gives a true copy.
Elephant ears contain needle-like crystals that irritate the mouth and skin if chewed or handled raw, and the bright orange seeds can tempt children and pets. Removing pods is a simple way to lower that risk.
An Ancient Flower Shape
The arum family has one of the oldest fossil records among flowering plants, dating to the Early Cretaceous, when dinosaurs lived.14Wikipedia. Araceae Fossil arum-family flower spikes from that age have been found in Spain.15Wikipedia. Araceae So the bloom on your patio carries a design that has lasted over 100 million years.