"Tacca integrifolia is an annual perforat Miami's Block Botanical Gardens.

I grow this plant in an oversized and extra well-draining pot, with soil to match. If the plant's growing conditions are optimal, this plant will often reveal itself as a controlled horticultural environment's first plant to show wilted leaves if favorable conditions get a little too dry; so it actually serves an important role as a decidedly low tech 'early-warning' humidity monitor in my greenhouses! Reapplying water will quickly reestablish the Tacca leave's turgor; evidencing its inherent resiliency.

Every few years when the mother plant get too tall and "leggy", I will efficiently propagate it by cutting off the extending tubers at the soil line, and immediately replant them touching the bottom of a new container with new soil media up to the emerging leaf.. In a few weeks to months the old pot's residual tubers sprout new plants, so in summary I grow and process this plant in a similar manner to most anthuriums.

In summary, Tacca sp. are straightforward horticulturally.... too bad more people don't do better with sustaining this freakishly beautiful ornamental flowering "White Bat Plant".

As an ethnobotanist, I would expect that there are a few respected growers in Bangladesh who understand and are successful working with Tacca sp. because its tubers are still used to provide a source of therapeutic chemicals used as botanical medicine."

Jeffrey S. Block, M.D.