Platycerium willinckii 'Little Crown'
Little Crown

What this name refers to

Little Crown is a trade name for a dwarf form of Platycerium willinckii. It is a market name, not a registered cultivar, and its history is unverified. A typical label reads P. willinckii Little crown sporeling "select". We could not trace who selected or named it. Names like this are usually coined by growers, so the same name from different sellers may not share a source. Some Taiwanese growers also call it 夢幻 (Menghuan, "dreamlike").

The label gives the parent species as P. willinckii, so it is not a form of P. coronarium; sellers use "crown" for the crown-shaped outline.

How to recognise it

There is no reliable way to identify it yet. Growers and sellers describe a compact plant with short, narrow fronds, forks gathered along the upper edge to give a crown-like outline, and a heavy white coating of stellate hairs. All of this is community description that no third party has checked. Sporelings segregate, and "select" only means the seller picked out better-looking plants; it does not promise a plant that stays dwarf or stays the same.

Easily confused with

• The species P. coronarium: in Chinese the names differ by one character, but that is a very large species.
• Other dwarf willinckii such as Totoro, Golden Boy and Aysun: hard to tell apart as seedlings, so go by the mother plant and the tag.
• Other plants sold as 夢幻: the word is generic and could be applied to other plants, so confirm which one is meant.

Care

Grow it as a dwarf willinckii: see dwarf willinckii care. In one community thread, growers' reports centre on it not moving: very slow growth, long stalls before it picks up again, plants that barely move at all, and some report losing all their plants one by one.

If it stalls, check in this order: light, airflow, drainage of the medium, and any accumulated summer heat damage. Do not start by remounting. Heavily coated forms are usually more sensitive to airflow and water, and tend to stall or even rot at the bud when the medium stays wet or the air is still. As long as the growing point is intact and shield fronds keep renewing, treat it as a slow individual; repeatedly remounting and changing the medium only lengthens recovery. See slow growth. Beginners should start with an easier plant and make sure conditions can stay stable before trying this one.

Three questions before you buy

1. Which mother plant? Ask for the spore parent and where it came from, and keep the tag with the plant.
2. How was it propagated? Sporeling, pup or tissue culture, and which generation. Also ask its size and whether it has moved past juvenile fronds; before that you cannot tell if it is dwarf.
3. Is the photo this plant? A photo of a single plant means you get that plant; for a batch, ask how much the plants vary.