While doing some IDing, I came across an interesting plant I had never seen before. This is the observation: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/33136633
By doing some googling, I found that species name, Christia obcordata. If you google that, you find lots of articles about a plant with stripy triangular leaves that look like the observation. However, the iNaturalist taxa page shows a plant with round, unstriped leaves: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/347296-Christia-obcordata
Looking at other observations, there are a couple with the stripy leaves in Singapore and Malaysia, and others with plain round leaves around Taiwan. Are they all the same plant? Is the triangular leafed stripy one a cultivar? Can anyone enlighten me?
Perhaps the young leaves are round, then as the plant grows, the leaves attain a triangular shape and gain stripes. Some of the leaves in that picture are somewhat triangular. See this image, the lower leaves are round https://www.etsy.com/sg-en/listing/709887746/graines-de-christia-obcordata-stripped
Or it could be that the image shown with round leaves is a similar plant that is not the swallowtail plant, it’s possible that for some species, no observations have been posted yet on inat.
Thanks for the link to the Etsy listing. Looking at the photos in people’s reviews, it seems the stripiness isn’t there on the seedlings, but (possibly) develops as the plant grows.
Since posting I found how to show the “cultivated” observations on the map on the taxa page, and found cultivated stripy plants in various locations around Asia. So it seems the natural plant found around Taiwan has smaller, rounded (although somewhat triangular), leaves without spectacular markings, and the cultivated one has much larger leaves with brilliant colouration. I guess that’s not surprising.
Anyway, I was initially concerned that I had incorrectly identified the plant in the observation, but I will leave it as it is.