Plant Highlight · Ficus roxburghii · From the Himalayan Foothills to Aiken

Leaves Like Lacquered Shields: The Elephant Ear Fig in a Southern Garden

Ficus roxburghii carries the largest leaf of any woody plant a Deep South garden can reasonably hold, dies to the ground most winters, and comes back reaching. Here is where the fig came from, why the name has moved twice, and how to site those enormous leaves so they stay whole.

9 min read · By Fiona von Grey · Aiken, South Carolina

I. A leaf you can hide behind

Most bold foliage in a Southern garden is borrowed from the tropics and behaves like a guest: a banana that shreds in the first thunderstorm, a colocasia that sulks by August. The elephant ear fig is a different proposition. Ficus roxburghii makes a round, heart-based, boldly veined leaf that in a good season runs twelve to fifteen inches across, and in the plant's native range can reach seventeen or eighteen. The surface is glossy and substantial, closer to lacquer than to leaf, and the young stems and new growth carry a fine bristle that catches light along the edge. New leaves emerge bronze and copper before hardening to deep green.

In the wet, warm hills of the native range, the fig grows as a small, wide-spreading tree, often on multiple trunks, fifteen to thirty feet tall along stream banks and in secondary forest. In Aiken the arithmetic changes. Hard frost cuts the top growth to the ground, the roots hold, and the plant comes back in spring with the vigor of something making up for lost time, six to ten feet of new growth in a single season with the leaves at their largest on the strongest shoots. That dieback is not a failure of the plant. Cutting the fig back is exactly what keeps the leaves enormous, in the same way a hard-pruned paulownia or catalpa throws leaves twice the size of an unpruned tree.

II. Two names, one fig, and a Scot in Calcutta

Gardeners know this plant as Ficus roxburghii. Botanists file the same fig under Ficus auriculata, and both names are correct in their own way. Ficus auriculata Lour. was published by the Portuguese missionary botanist Joao de Loureiro in 1790, in a flora of Cochinchina written from years of collecting in what is now Vietnam. Ficus roxburghii Wall. ex Steud. followed fifty years later, in 1840. The earlier name wins under the rules of priority, so auriculata is the accepted name today and roxburghii is a synonym. We keep roxburghii on the label because that is the name the plant has carried through Southern gardens and the name people still ask for.

Both names are worth knowing, because each carries half the description. Auriculata comes from the Latin auricula, a little ear, for the two lobes that sit at the base of the leaf where the blade meets the stalk. Turn a leaf over and the ears are unmistakable, which is also how the plant earned the elephant ear in English.

The other name honors William Roxburgh, the Scottish surgeon and botanist who ran the Calcutta Botanic Garden and is remembered as the father of Indian botany. Roxburgh spent decades cataloging the flora of the subcontinent with a discipline that was unusual for the period, commissioning Indian artists to paint specimens at a standard that still holds up. A great many South Asian plants carry the name; this fig is among the most conspicuous.

III. Figs on the trunk, and an honest word about fruit

Here is where the elephant ear fig gets genuinely strange. The figs do not hang from the twigs. They erupt directly from the trunk, from old wood, and from long leafless runners that snake out from the base of the plant along the ground, a habit botanists call cauliflory when the fruit comes off the trunk and geocarpy when the runners carry the crop down to soil level. A mature tree in the native range can be so thickly studded around the base that the whole lower trunk disappears under hundreds of fat, downy, pinkish figs. The evolutionary logic is straightforward enough: fruit near the ground is fruit that ground-dwelling mammals can reach and disperse.

The pollination is stranger still. Like every fig, this one flowers inside the receptacle, invisibly, and relies on a wasp small enough to force a way in through the ostiole at the tip. For Ficus auriculata that wasp is Ceratosolen emarginatus, and the relationship is close to exclusive: the fig produces a particular blend of volatile compounds that this wasp is tuned to find, and the wasp completes a life cycle nowhere else in any reliable way. The species is also functionally dioecious, meaning the male and female figs are borne on separate plants, so a fruiting crop in the native range needs both sexes and the wasp shuttling between them.

IV. A tree people live with

Across the Himalayan foothills, monsoon Asia, and southwest China, this fig is not an ornamental. The plant is infrastructure. In Bhutan and Nepal, where the species is known as timilo, nimaro, and timla, farmers grow the fig in and around fields as a fodder tree, cutting leafy branches for cattle through the dry months, and agricultural researchers have gone to the trouble of ranking farmers' preferences and measuring the fodder quality, which tells you how seriously the tree is taken. The leaves, being the size of dinner plates, have long served as exactly that, along with wrappers for food and rough shelter.

The best culinary story belongs to central Vietnam, where the fig is called va and grows around Hue. The green figs are boiled, peeled, sliced, and squeezed of their bitter juice, then tossed hot with pork, shrimp, roasted sesame, and Vietnamese coriander into a dish called va tron, once a court dish of the Nguyen emperors and now a fixture at weddings and family gatherings, scooped up with sesame rice crackers. The figs also go into jams, juices, and curries across the range, and the ripe fruit is sweet enough to eat straight from the trunk.

There is a medicinal tradition as well, and we will describe rather than prescribe. Village and folk Ayurvedic practice has used the astringent bark and fruit for digestive complaints and the milky latex as a rough dressing for cuts, and modern phytochemical work has confirmed the fruit is rich in phenolic compounds. Formal clinical evidence is thin. Nothing here is medical advice, and the latex, like that of most figs, can irritate skin.

V. Siting the elephant ear fig in the South

Woodlanders came to this plant by the best possible route, which is a gardener who had already proved the point. Joe LeVert of Augusta, Georgia, a true Southern plantsman, grew a root-hardy specimen through many an Augusta winter and brought the fig to our attention. Our stock descends from that plant, which is worth saying plainly: what we grow is not a tropical import taking a chance on the climate but a line that has already been tested against real Southern cold.

Site the fig the way you would site a plant grown entirely for texture. Give a warm, sheltered corner, a south-facing wall, a courtyard, or a wind-still glen where the great leaves can open without tearing. Wind is the enemy of the whole effect; a leaf shredded in June stays shredded until frost. Set the plant against fine-textured neighbors so the scale reads: little bluestem, a fine fern, an airy salvia, anything that makes the leaf look larger by contrast. In a mixed tropical-style border the fig plays the part a banana plays, without the banana's habit of falling over.

Soil should be fertile and moisture-retentive but still draining, enriched with compost or rotted manure. Those leaves transpire freely and the plant dislikes drought, so water steadily through the growing season. Full sun grows the strongest stems, though a little afternoon shade in the fiercest weeks keeps the leaf edges from scorching. Come autumn, mulch deeply over the crown; that mulch is what carries the roots through. In early spring, cut the frost-killed stems back to the ground and let the plant flush from the base.

VI. The plant at a glance

VII. Questions we get asked