My garden is renowned for the hundred or so very large red, salmon or green aechmeas standing up to two metres tall when in flower. My bromeliad interest has always been neoregelias so why am I writing about aechmeas? Purely a case of serendipity. Spotting a red leaved Aechmea blanchetiana once and that was enough to break my resolve down but then seeing a slide presented by Thelma O’Reily at the ninth conference of Australian Bromeliad Societies in West Australia was the pheromone setting me on the path to smell one out. By e-mail I have tried to set up search parties to find her plant on the beaches in Rio de Janeiro. One of my friends a frequent tourist for such places said tongue in cheek, “ My wife has forbidden me to pick up anything (anyone?) that I find on beaches, and I definitely can’t bring them home”.
You probably know that common folk like us acting like fully trained botanists stick ‘Rubra’ onto the name of anything more red than normal. Well—this lead to seed on the ‘rubra’ form on Aechmea blanchetiana coming my way. Growing these up in good faith I even wrote an article detailing the different colouring in the leaves of the young plants. In a latter article I wrote about the flowering diversity. Not a species. After contacting the grower, my so called “Rubra” turned out to be seed from a hybrid. The seed baring plant looked like a red form of Aechmea blanchetiana but was actually found to be Aech ‘Forest Fire’. The other plants in flower at the time were Aechmea ‘Peaches ‘n Cream’ and the bronze leaved form of Aechmea blanchetiana.
My seedlings are all different. Some key out as Aechmea blanchetiana others as Aechmea rubens but none fit the description of either parent. From my study of all the flowers I feel sure of an ancestor, Aechmea blanchetiana and confidant another ancestor is Aechmea mulfordii or a hybrid of the same. Aechmea rubens could be somewhere in the mix but now I am speculating.
So what do we know about this parent plant Aechmea “Forest Fire’, the so called Aech blanchetiana ‘Rubra’ ?
1) It definitely has a large amount of Aech blanchetiana genetics.
2) From what the owner has told me, knowing the breeder of Aechmea ‘Forest Fire’ is that it is almost definitely Aechmea blanchetiana x Aechmea ‘Peaches ‘n Cream’.
3) If there is an exogenous parent of the seed supplied it would most commonly be Aechmea blanchetiana, the bronze leaved form. The seed supplier never had the green form or the more recently discovered yellow or red forms large enough to flower. The existence of the yellow form needs confirmation. It turned up in a collection in Africa so could be a hybrid. I expect it to flower at the end of 2005. I believe I have suggested a yellow form in a previous article. The plant in mention, not the African, plant turned out to be a hybrid.
I’ll take off my academic hat and write about some of these now flowering plants. If you were interested in the above discussion on possible parentage see my earlier article going into it in more depth1. There is not room in this article to show all the named cultivars but they are all available for perusal on the http://fcbs.org/pictures.htm site on the internet.
Plants with Salmon or Red Coloured Leaves
From the 200 or so seedlings these were the ones I kept. Early flowerings showed that the green leaved forms usually had inflorescences unlike Aechmea blanchetiana1. Being hybrids this has not always been the case as I found out this year..
Aechmea ‘Fire Up’: I believe this to be a selfing of Aechmea Forest Fire. So far it is the most red inflorescence that I have seen in any of Aechmea blanchetiana alliance. The developing inflorescence is deep red. This total redness is eventually broken by the emergence of bright yellow flowers. Plant is a salmon to red colour going more yellow in direct sunlight and more green in shade. Spikes rather clumped with inflorescence stately and erect. A top plant.
Aechmea ‘Golden Glow’: Again I believe this to be a selfing of Aechmea ‘Forest Fire’ but It has a red rachis with red and yellow floral bracts giving a gold appearance. A very large and spreading inflorescence staying erect for more than six months. This is generally admired by all and generally considered the most beautiful of all these plants.
Aechmea ‘Red Flame’: An exceptionally red plant when grown in bright light. Actually stays red in full sun. Inflorescence brightly coloured red and yellow but spikes unlike Aechmea blanchetiana, being short and clumped.
Aechmea ‘Smouldering Embers’: This plant is most easily described as a miniature Aechmea blanchetiana so I expect it is an outcross with Aechmea blanchetiana. Looks like bright red and orange beads threaded along the spike. It surprised me by flowering smaller (1.3 m to top of inflorescence) than the others so before registering I waited for an extra flowering. It was the same. Spikes are long and not clustered but unlike Aechmea blanchetiana, do not have the singularly most important taxonomical feature, that is flowers separated by visible stem (lax) at early flowering (anthesis) time.
Aechmea ‘Forest Flame’: Flower contrasts with Aechmea ‘Smouldering Embers’. Very large stretching 1.8 m to the tip of the inflorescence. I describe it as a chunky inflorescence.
Aechmea ‘Yellow Ochre’: A stunning large erect and stately plant (1.8 m). Gathers nearly as many votes of approval as Neo Golden Glow. Inflorescence is nearly all yellow as first flower breaks in November / December but now in May there is a lot of red showing in the floral bracts.
Aech ‘Pale Face’: A very unusual flower. Bright red scape with spikes almost monochrome translucent yellow. Somewhat weirdly to my way of thinking, this plant, after going to so much trouble to develop an insipiently yellow inflorescence (rachis, spikes and all types of bracts this translucent yellow) suddenly, late in its life, develops red fruiting bodies. These fruits turn purplish black like all the others in this alliance when seed matures. Don’t the birds half like them!
Green Leaved Plants
Most of these have to my way of thinking, not been worthy of a clonal name as the flowers of most have had very little colour in the very narrow congested spikes.
I have only registered two of these. These being Aechmea Orange Age which has a very flexible flower spike which goes orange as it ages and quickly becomes pendulous. This is very strange and must be an outcross with something like Portea leptantha (a guess). The other is Aechmea ‘Fatso’ which is a shorter squat plant when grown in full sun. Leaves have water mark variegations. Such variegations are not white just thinning of strips of the leaves. I have one as yet unnamed plant which is green but does have a contrasting bright red inflorescence.
Aechmea blanchetiana: I have included this photo to show the unique flower spike, see insert at the top left hand corner of the photo—note the stem is visible between flowers at anthesis .
The plants in mention, when out of flower, namely Aechmea blanchetiana and Aechmea ‘Forest Fire’ hybrids are almost indistinguishable to the untrained eye. If you mix them up the following may help.
General characteristics that I have found with my plants:
(1)
Floral bracts shorter than flower internode—A. blanchetiana
Floral bracts longer than flower internode— Aechmea Forest Fire hybrid
(2)
Spikes short rarely reaching 15 cm------------ Aechmea ‘Forest Fire’ hybrid
Spike long not less than 15 cm----------------Aechmea blanchetiana and
Exception Aechmea ‘Orange Glow’ (to18 cm)
(3)
Spikes in clumps over most of the inflorescence-------- Aechmea Forest Fire
. Spikes in clumps only on lower branches-----------------A. blanchetiana
Rob Smythe MSc
1) R. Smythe “Aech blanchetiana ‘Rubra’ x self” Bromeliaceae Vol 36, No 1 May/June 2002 p 9 -13