I'm a Garden Editor, and Here's Why Giant Leopard Plant Is My Must-Have Garden Addition

Leonardo Marino / Getty Images

It took me about a decade of gardening to learn restraint at the nursery when shopping for plants. But these days, I'm pretty strict about what makes it into my tiny backyard garden: Plants need to serve a real aesthetic or practical purpose and have interesting foliage for most, if not all, of the year.

That’s why the giant leopard plant (Farfugium japonicum var.giganteum), with its unusual, oversized round leaves, recently caught my eye. Lately, I’ve been spotting it in some of my favorite garden designers’ projects, including many in warm, dry regions like the one I live in. Maybe it was the plant to finally fill an empty patch of a shady bed in my backyard? Before making the leap, though, I needed to do my homework.

Lee Gray

Giant leopard plant (sometimes called tractor seat plant) is an herbaceous perennial with glossy round leaves up to 18 inches across on plants reaching 3 to 4 feet tall. It comes from Japan, where it grows in shady spots along stream banks and in coastal areas. In late summer and fall, it sports small, yellow, daisy-like flowers.

Matthew Benson

Travis Hallmark, Courtesy of Word + Carr

Garden designers are drawn to the giant leopard plant for the same reason it appealed to me: Those leaves. «Its rounded leaf form and glossy green color reminds us of a lily pond's edge,“ says Jessie Booth, partner (with Clementine Jang) at California landscape design firm Soft Studio. Flora Grubb notes that the plant is hugely popular at her eponymous style-forward nurseries in San Francisco and Los Angeles: „The adorable leaves remind me of the Pilea peperomioides, which people also went nuts for a few years ago.“ Yep, I was one of those people.

Megan McConnell, plant information