This stunning tropical vegetable, a staple food around the globe, is grown as an ornamental plant in the UK
I do not have space for more plants, but that doesn’t stop me from scrolling endlessly through online catalogues and filling my head full of wild dreams. Most of it gets no further than that, but some things find their way into the basket, like the three huge taro corms that arrived one day. Each one is the size of a large grapefruit and packed with the promise of giant leaves to come.
Taro, Colocasia esculenta, is one of the earliest known vegetables. It has a huge, round, starchy corm, similar to a sweet potato, and is a staple around the globe, from Māori culture to Africa and south Asia.