Trop picks: Monstera

Here's a clever tweak on the ancient custom of eating off banana leaves. Although that practice has many benefits, you could argue that it's not the most elegant manner of eating. Replace the banana leaf with a monstera leaf, however, and put it under and not on your plate, and you get a lovely, stencil-like placemat that references a culinary heritage while being utterly modern.

The monstera isn't native to Southeast Asia, unlike the banana (first cultivated by humans on the island of New Guinea). Still, we could pretend that it’s part of the banana diaspora that settled in Central America.* Like the banana, the large surface area of the monstera leaf is an evolutionary adaption that allows the plant to maximise its absorption of sunlight. This is especially important to its survival as an understory plant. Also like the banana, the perforations in the leaf allow the monstera to withstand the strongest of tropical gales without rendering it useless for light absorption.

And if you need further reason to try this out at your next dinner party, consider this: the social climbers at your soirée will find a kindred spirit in this plant. As a young buck, the monstera snakes its way through dense undergrowth to the darkest parts of the jungle where the largest trees with the tallest trunks grow. Once there, it latches on to the trunk and claws its way to the light.

*Technically, they're not related.