After attending one of Dennis Hundscheidt’s Tropical Gardening workshops last year, I took away a list of plants that he recommended as the best plants for tropical landscapes in South East Queensland.

On that list was a selection of shade plants, including Aglaonemas – an often overlooked genus with value in the tropical garden.

Out of the varieties he mentioned, he said there was one standout for hardiness and ability to handle the cold in SEQ winters: ‘B.J. Freeman’.

Ever since, this plant has been on my Wishlist but incredibly elusive to find. I spoke to a local nursery who said they could only see one nursery growing these wholesale in Victoria, in Yackandandah near the NSW border and Albury/Wodonga. They said they wouldn’t order them from that nursery because the freight would be so expensive it would not make commercial sense to get them up to Brisbane.

So I started thinking a little bit differently and have been scouring Facebook Marketplace. I finally found a plant that looked identical to photos of ‘B.J. Freeman’ being sold by a lady in Morningside, so I bought it from her. It had no ID attached to it, so I also took to a Facebook group for Aglaonemas collectors to share a photo to get a consensus on whether it is actually B.J. Freeman. The response I received was, ‘yes’ it was ‘B.J. Freeman’ AKA ‘Silver King’. Great!

But with plant names and identification, sometimes all is not as it seems…

I also recently got hold of a Cordyline book by the late B. Frank Brown. I didn’t know much about Dr Brown other than his association with Cordylines, and a quick Google search showed that he was also a big Aglaonema collector and breeder and that he had bred ‘B.J. Freeman’ in the 1980s, naming this Aglaonema after his daughter.

As it turns out, ‘Silver King’ is not the same plant. My further digging brought up the following:

‘Silver King’ was a hybrid bred by Bob McColley in the 1960s from parent plants A pictum ‘Tricolor’ and A nitidum ‘Curtisii’. See: https://www.aroid.org/gallery/gibernau/aroideana/0110204.pdf

B.J. Freeman was bred by B. Frank Brown in the 1980s, and is a hybrid of A. crispum. He named this aglaonema after his daughter. See: https://patents.justia.com/patent/PP6857

In other words, they are not the same plant! I theorise that the nursery industry has mislabelled and confused these two varieties (possibly by selling ‘B.J. Freeman’ as ‘Silver King’) – hence why I a received a response from this group that they are synonyms as the photos plants labeled ‘Silver King’, to my eye more closely resemble ‘B.J. Freeman’. Just another reminder that you cannot always rely on plant labels for correct identification!