I've never had any schooling in either botany or taxonomy, but I have grown tropical plants for more than 60 years in the Miami, Florida area. I also have a curious mind regarding the plants I grow. I went from my first love, palms, to bromeliads, and we have had a long association.

For some time now my favorite bromeliad group is Aechmea chantinii, and, if anything, it has intensified.

Does anyone have all the cultivars of Ae. chantinii? I doubt it. Don Beadle's book, "The Bromeliad Cultivar Registry," June 1998, a classic, lists some 34 cultivars. I'm sure that some of the names are duplicate with most of the cultivars being made from Florida west to California, and from many other areas in the United States, Europe, Asia and South America. Ae. chantinii has also been extensively hybridized. No other bromeliad that I know of has as many cultivars. And now I will stick my neck out and let the splitters and lumpers be damned, and say that Ae. chantinii is a species that acts like a hybrid. I have read everything I could read including the BSI Journal (an excellent source of information) going back to almost the very beginning. Since I'm retired now, every so often I read old issues of the Journal and the tip off came when I was reading an article in one of those issues (Vol. 1, No. 3, 1951) by Charles Chevalier, a curator of the great botanical gardens of the University of Liege, Belgium in which he wrote, "One curious discovery was that the Ae. chantinii, from which no results had been obtainable by auto-fecundation [self-pollination], gave when fecundated by Ae. fulgens discolor, a whole series of really remarkable plants. These had leaves of every shade from olive green to reddish brown, and thickly flowering cupitula [heads] well separated above the foliage, presenting a whole gamut of warm bright colors, from canary yellow, through orange and salmon pink to coral red." Primary crosses between species of each other just don't do that. There is very little difference between the progeny.

Yet Ae. chantinii continues to be cross pollinated with each other, and as long as this happens there will continue to be new cultivars.

The first Ae. chantinii was introduced by M. Baraguin from Brazil in 1877 into France. It was first described by Baker in 1889.

All attempts to self-pollinate it failed and so it could only be propagated by division of the suckers. As a result, it continued to be very rare and grown mostly by European botanical gardens. Many years ago, through a series of seed and plant trades, I finally obtained an offset which still grows in my large oak tree in my front yard. The plant is of medium size and continues to grow smaller in size than most forms.

In Vol. XXV, 1975, No. 3, Victoria Padilla wrote, "So far as it can be determined, no more specimens of this plant were collected because the...