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I wanted to add some easy color to the porch for the summer, so I picked up a bag of "Carolyn Wharton" caladium corms and did up some planters. I'm familiar with this very common cultivar, which is supposed to have purplish stems, magenta veins, pink mottling and green leaf edges (as shown in several PlantFiles photos http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/57290/)
I assumed that all caladium cultivars are propagated vegetatively and should be identical but, much to my surprise, only two out of a dozen plants came up true to type! The majority are missing all the magenta. They have the pink mottling, but the veins are green and the stems are brownish. One plant came up with unusually smooth and shiny leaves with a very large magenta center and a few flecks of pink. That one is a particularly attractive plant that could easily be a marketable variety, but it's far from what it was supposed to be.
The scenario I see in my mind is that the producer decided to propagate from seed to increase production and simply selected offspring that were "in the ballpark" to resemble the named cultivar. Is this possible, or is there some other likely explanation?
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