Meet your Houseplant: The Swiss Cheese Plant

Monstera adansonii, also known as the “Swiss Cheese Plant,” is a flowering vine widespread across South and Central America. One look at this vine reveals the reason for its dairy-inspired name, the leaves are naturally riddled with holes. Why on Earth would a plant do that?

Window-like holes in a leaf are known as “fenestrations,” and hypotheses abound as to their purpose. Some scientists think the holes provide passages for strong winds, allowing the leaves to avoid damage from hurricanes. Others think the holes help a plant regulate its temperature in strong sunlight by creating more areas for evaporation. Still others think the holes allow passages for rain water to fall down to the soil.

But none of these theories really satisfying explain the Swiss Cheese Plant’s fenestrations. Plenty of tropical plants are subjected to hurricane-strength winds, but they don’t make holes in their leaves. As a vine, the Swiss Cheese Plant grows in the shade and doesn’t need to worry about overheating, and water is not exactly a limited resource in rainforests. 

Why put so many holes in a good leaf? The answer seems to be that this way of making a leaf maximizes the plant’s ability to collect sunlight while expending as little energy as possible. By creating fenestrations, the Swiss Cheese Plant can grow larger leaves without having to invest the same amount of energy needed to maintain a large, intact leaf. Because only shifting flecks of sunlight filter down through the jungle canopy, an intact leaf would actually be a waste of energy, since only some regions of the leaf are exposed to sunlight at any given time.

The morals of the story are “don’t pay more for what you won’t use” and “sometimes a wide net is better than a small pan.”

Now if I could only convince my wife that the holes in the knee of my favorite pair of jeans serves some profound evolutionary purpose… 

Works Cited:

Muir, Christopher D. "How did the Swiss cheese plant get its holes?." The American Naturalist 181.2 (2013): 273-281.

Brian Rutter, PhD, is the cofounder of Thing in a Pot Productions and a postdoctoral researcher in plant biology at Indiana University. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive our “Things About Things – Odd Facts About Plants” and video production tips in your inbox every month!