Plants of the genus Cryptocoryne are aquatic and rheophytic Aroids found in only in Asia.
Long heralded as the king of aquarium plants they have a reputation for being delicate, hardy, easy to grow, impossible to keep alive and are among if not the most colorful and exotic looking as any plant on earth.
While appreciated as an aquarium plant because of the foliage, they are also kept and collected by people interested in plants but nor necessarily aquariums, because of the flower, and apart from and other that they are the subject of scientific work as they are still largely unknown.
Around 2005 or so, on Borneo Island photographing Cryptocoryne species that had never appeared in any book and from there on out the number of plants and photos from Asia just exploded when the Internet and inexpensive digital cameras were just becoming available. We presently live in the golden age of Cryptocoryne: there have been more species found and described in the last 5 years as there have been in the previous 50!
