Platycerium willinckii 'Totoro'
Totoro

What the name refers to

Totoro is a dwarf selection of Platycerium willinckii. Taiwanese sellers mostly call it 豆豆龍 (Doudoulong), PlatyWiki lists it as 龍貓, and outside Taiwan it goes by Totoro; all three names come from Hayao Miyazaki's film My Neighbor Totoro. It is a trade name, not a registered cultivar.

How to recognise it

Reliable descriptions are scarce, and they disagree:

• PlatyWiki gives "short, broad fertile fronds, forked many times", but the sentence is word for word the same as its entry for dwarf Yellow Moon, so it is not specific to Totoro.
• Sellers abroad describe it as heavily forked, chubby and symmetrical, with round shields.
• Taiwanese listings usually say fine hands, dense forking and many layers.

So this page does not set out a standard description. Identifying a Totoro comes down to mature photos of that plant and its record of origin, not the name.

Names it gets confused with

Listings abroad often pair it with Yellow Moon Dwarf (YMD), as in "Yellow Moon Dwarf (Totoro)". But Yellow Moon Dwarf is a collective name for a group of dwarf individuals selected from Yellow Moon sporelings, and PlatyWiki notes that dwarf Yellow Moon comes in many forms; Totoro is one plant selected and named from that group, so the two names are not interchangeable. 'Yellow Moon' itself is usually described as having long, pale, yellowish fertile fronds.

Mostly sporelings on the market

The Totoro sold abroad and in Japan is almost always spore-grown: some growers sow spores they were given, and some batches are crosses with Totoro as one parent. Japanese sellers themselves say these sporelings come in endless forms. Two plants sold under the same name can grow up very differently.

How care differs from the species

Follow Platycerium willinckii and growing dwarf willinckii: plenty of light, water once dry, moving air. A small plant in little medium needs water less often than a long-armed willinckii.

Three questions before you buy

1. How was it propagated? Pup, sporeling or tissue culture, and for a sporeling, who the parents were.
2. Can you see a mature plant? Of this plant or of its mother.
3. Which name does the seller mean? Doudoulong, 龍貓, Totoro and Yellow Moon Dwarf get used loosely, so ask which one they mean.

Where the name came from

According to a Facebook post cited by PlatyWiki, Totoro was picked from choice dwarf Yellow Moon sporelings, then grown out and named in Taiwan by Huang Chih-ming, from a line that originated in Thailand. This is a community account: we could not find the selector's own description, or the year it was selected.