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Description
elephant ear plant water Low Rider Elephant Ear – Plant DetectivesLow Rider Elephant Ear (Alocasia 'Low Rider') Low Rider Elephant Ear is a compact tropical plant valued for its glossy foliage, sturdy upright form, and bold texture in a smaller footprint. As a dwarf selection related to larger upright elephant ears, it brings the same lush tropical look without overwhelming patios, containers, bright indoor spaces, or smaller garden beds. Its heart shaped green leaves and thick stems create strong structure without
Low Rider Elephant Ear (Alocasia 'Low Rider')
Low Rider Elephant Ear is a compact tropical plant valued for its glossy foliage, sturdy upright form, and bold texture in a smaller footprint. As a dwarf selection related to larger upright elephant ears, it brings the same lush tropical look without overwhelming patios, containers, bright indoor spaces, or smaller garden beds. Its heart-shaped green leaves and thick stems create strong structure without relying on flowers for impact. With bright filtered light, rich well-drained soil, steady moisture, warmth, and humidity, Low Rider Elephant Ear is a versatile choice for indoor collections, seasonal containers, and protected warm-weather plantings.
Distinctive Features
Low Rider Elephant Ear produces glossy green, heart-shaped leaves with wavy margins held on thick, sturdy stems. The plant stays much shorter than many large Alocasia selections, usually forming a dense clump with a broad tropical look at a manageable size. Its foliage gives containers and interior plantings a bold, architectural quality while remaining easier to place than giant elephant ears. Mature plants may produce a pale green spathe with a creamy white spadix, but the flowers are not the main feature and the plant is grown primarily for its compact tropical foliage.
Growing Conditions
- Sun: Grows best in bright indirect light, filtered sun, or partial shade, with some tolerance for gentle sun when moisture is consistent.
- Soil: Prefers fertile, organically rich, well-drained soil or a chunky indoor aroid mix that holds light moisture while allowing good root aeration.
- Water: Keep soil evenly moist during active growth, allowing the upper portion to dry slightly before watering again, and avoid soggy conditions.
- USDA Zones: Often grown as a houseplant or seasonal container plant, with outdoor hardiness generally around USDA Zones 8 to 11 when protected and well mulched in colder parts of the range.
- Mature Size: Typically reaches about 2 feet tall and 2 feet wide, making it much more compact than many upright elephant ear selections.
- Habit: Forms a compact, upright, clumping tropical plant with glossy leaves rising from the base on stout petioles.
Ideal Uses
- Focal Point: Use as a compact tropical focal point in patio containers, entry planters, bright indoor rooms, courtyards, poolside groupings, or protected garden beds where bold foliage can stand out.
- Container Planting: Grow in a decorative pot where its upright habit and manageable size can add lush texture without becoming too large.
- Patio Plant: Use outdoors during warm weather to bring tropical foliage to patios, decks, porches, and shaded seating areas.
- Houseplant: Grow indoors in bright filtered light where warmth, humidity, and careful watering can support healthy foliage.
- Mixed Tropical Display: Pair with caladiums, ferns, begonias, pothos, or other foliage plants for a layered container or seasonal garden design.
Low Maintenance Care
- Watering: Water when the upper soil begins to dry, then allow excess water to drain fully so the roots stay moist but never waterlogged.
- Humidity: Provide moderate to high humidity indoors to help reduce leaf edge browning and support clean foliage growth.
- Light Care: Place in bright filtered light and rotate container plants occasionally to encourage balanced growth.
- Fertilizing: Feed during the active growing season with a balanced fertilizer to support steady foliage production.
- Overwintering: Move container plants indoors before cold weather or protect outdoor plants from freezing conditions with mulch and winter protection where appropriate.
- Leaf Cleanup: Remove yellowing, damaged, or tired leaves as needed to keep the plant looking clean and encourage fresh growth.
Why Choose Low Rider Elephant Ear?
- Compact Size: Offers the bold tropical look of an elephant ear in a much smaller form for containers, patios, and indoor spaces.
- Glossy Foliage: Produces heart-shaped green leaves with wavy margins for rich texture and strong visual impact.
- Upright Structure: Adds clean architectural form without taking up the space required by larger Alocasia selections.
- Container Friendly: Performs well in decorative pots where it can be enjoyed outdoors in warm weather and protected indoors before cold temperatures arrive.
- Versatile Tropical Effect: Works well as a houseplant, patio feature, seasonal accent, poolside plant, or compact foliage focal point.
Low Rider Elephant Ear is an excellent choice for gardeners who want bold Alocasia foliage in a compact, easy-to-place form. Its glossy leaves, sturdy upright habit, manageable size, and tropical character make it a dependable option for containers, patios, bright indoor spaces, and protected warm-season plantings.
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4.5 ★★★★★
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★★★★★ 5
This 1944 classic recounts the fatal flaws of market liberalism that led to the Great Depression and World Wars I & II
Format: Paperback
The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Karl Polanyi. 1944.
In 1944, the opposing monumental classics, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek and The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, were published. From the right, Hayek argued that market liberalism led to prosperity, political liberty, and prevention of authoritarian governance. From the left, Polanyi argued that the rise of market liberalism during the industrial revolution led to intolerable hardship, inevitable unsustainable countermeasures, and finally collapse into fascism, the Great Depression, and World Wars I and II.
Since their publication during World War II, these markedly opposed ideas have now been tested by seventy years of history. For the first thirty years after the war, policies reflecting Polanyi’s ideas led to a mixed economy of government policies and regulated markets in the US, northern Europe, and elsewhere that produced robustly increased prosperity broadly shared at all income levels. For the next forty years, ascendency of Hayek’s ideas led to reduction of the role of government with attendant economic instability, rising inequality (with all economic gains going to the rich in the US), and coercive imposition of market liberalism by authoritarian governments with disastrous results throughout Latin America and the former Soviet Union. Given the adverse consequences of resurgent market liberalism, the rebuttal of its ideas in The Great Transformation is as important today as ever.
In The Great Transformation, Polanyi maintains that before the industrial revolution, markets did not play an important role in human society—they were embedded in society rather than the other way around. Goods and services were generally distributed without the motive for profit by the non-market mechanisms of reciprocity according to social relations, centralized storage with redistribution, and production for one’s own use known as householding. When present, the role of markets was peripheral and subordinate to politics, religion, and social relations.
The industrial revolution brought about an almost miraculous improvement in the tools of production accompanied by catastrophic dislocations of the lives of the common people, of which poverty was merely the economic aspect. During this time, English thinkers created the theory of market liberalism, which radically reversed the previous subordination of markets to society by removing the role for government so that society was instead subordinated to self-regulating markets (without government interference).
This change required that human labor, nature, and money be turned into commodities that could be bought and sold without regard to human and social considerations. Efficient functioning of markets also required callous indifference to the social dislocation, poverty, and damage to nature that resulted and even to hunger as a motivating factor for the working class. This change from regulated to self-regulating markets that organized the whole of society on the principle of gain and profit marked a great transformation of the nature of society by the removal of democratic control of markets.
The goals of this transformation were unrealistically utopian and could never be achieved without annihilating the human and natural substance of society. Even during its installation, laissez-faire proved to be a myth. Government action was mandatory to adjust the supply of money and credit, to enforce provisions for labor and land, and to prevent political disruption. Even with this level of government activity, market liberalism still imposed unsustainable hardships on ordinary people from speculative excess, growing inequality, competition from imports, depressions, unemployment, poverty, and reduced entitlement to assistance.
By the late 1800s, these impossible pressures of the self-regulating market necessarily led to a countermovement in industrialized nations to protect their societies from the market. This countermovement included protectionism for national markets and competition for colonies to take resources from other societies. In exotic and colonial regions with the absence of protective measures unspeakable suffering resulted. Thus Polanyi characterizes market societies as having two opposing movements, referred to as a “double movement.” These two contradictory movements resulted in simultaneous struggles to expand the scope of the market because of the opportunities for some and to limit the scope of the market because of the adverse consequences for many.
These internal contradictions led to disruptive stresses and strains that were unsustainable for market societies. In the domestic economy, class conflict resulted from issues like the choice between inflation for stability of workers incomes and employment and deflation for stability of currency for investors. Market liberals from Spencer to Mises held that popular democracy was a danger to capitalism and that workers should not have the right to vote. In the international economy, relentless shocks imposed by the gold standard forced nations to consolidate around heightened national and imperial boundaries. In international politics, intensified political, military, and economic rivalries finally culminated in World War I.
By this time, the class struggle over market liberalism was at an impasse. For a critical decade, economic liberals supported authoritarian intervention in service of their deflationary policy to protect currency exchange and investment. This merely weakened the democratic forces that might otherwise have averted the fascist catastrophe. During the Great Depression, the gold standard finally collapsed, foreign debts were repudiated, capital markets and world trade dwindled away, and the global political and economic system disintegrated. In a second great transformation of society that followed, the replacements of market society by fascism, socialism, and the New Deal were similar only in discarding laissez-faire principles. The conflict between the market and the elementary requirements of an organized social life had ultimately destroyed society. World Wars I and II merely hastened its destruction.
In 1944, Polanyi appears to have regarded the utopia of market liberalism as utterly discredited. He expressed the hope that the passing of market economy could become the beginning of an era of unprecedented freedom. He noted that freedom as the absence of power and compulsion as claimed by market liberals is not possible in a complex society. The function of power is to ensure the measure of conformity which is needed for the survival of the group: its ultimate source is opinion.
Regulation both extends and restricts freedom; only the balance of freedoms lost and won is significant. The comfortable classes enjoy the freedom provided by leisure in security. They resent the suggestion to spread out income, leisure, and security to extend to others the freedom they enjoy. Obviously, those who lack security cannot enjoy the same freedom as the comfortable classes. Those who want more freedom for all need not fear that either power or planning will undermine their freedom. Regulation and control in a complex society strive to give us all the security we need to achieve freedom not only for the few, but for all.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2017
★★★★★ 5
Must read for contemporary (and all) times.
Format: Paperback
This is a great book. I wonder why we were not taught this in the freshman year, or at least as a counterpoint to Econ101. It opens up the perspective to seeing culture, economics, politics, and technology in an integrated way with an emphasis on social choesion as a unifying fabric for humanity and, looking for the right rate of economic reform. Much of what we do as "development" can in fact be harmful in the long (also short) run if we are not sensitive to the premises Polanyi is alerting us to. This is not counterpoint or counterfactual thesis per se. I am a strong proponent of the market system and also realize that this system is subsumed and must be complementary to the larger, complex social system where things are interconnected. An effective policy can only result from the collective consideration of these together. Polanyi's writing style is clear, direct, and simple and, unlike deeply nomenclature-intense economics write-ups, this book is rather an easy read. When we prescribe/teach The Industrial Revolution as an essential or secondary reading, The Great Transformation should also be a companion reading.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2013
★★★★★ 5
Read!
Format: Paperback
Well, I was going to review this wonderful work. However, Robert Moore's review is so spot on that there is really no need to take up more space. Also I need a nap. Anyway, this book is truly fascinating. If you are at all interested in Political Economy, this is perhaps one of the most important books you will ever read. There is no school which has the authors name attached to it, nor is there a political movement dedicated to the realization of his ideas. In most cases this is because the author did not contribute original thought or make an adequate connection of his thought process with reality. In Polanyi's case, this is because the originality of his thought cuts through the specialized form in which science and social studies is presented today and cannot possible be claimed to belong to 'economics' any more than it can of 'sociology', 'anthropology', 'history', 'international relations', etc..
Read this book.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2009
★★★★★ 5
Understanding the Market vs Government influence
Format: Paperback
A must read.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2025
★★★★★ 5
Great book!
Format: Paperback
We read this story as a class read aloud after we read the first Sprinkles and the Unicorn book. They noticed similar characters, and loved the story line. They’re begging me to buy the whole series of this and all the other books! I can’t read them fast enough.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2026