A hardy Australian hybrid named for the gold rush town of Gympie. The plants are upright somewhat tubular rosettes about 20 inches tall, with gray-green leaves and an inflorescence resembling both parents, Ae. gamosepala x caudata, with simple or branching pink spikes and showy yellow flowers. Fairly cold hardy.

Leaves that are blacker than black (for a plant). A graceful rosette that starts out upright then as the inch wide leaves lengthen, arch over, forming a wide rosette. The inflorescence is a handsome pendant spike of red berries and blue flowers.

This is one outstanding plant! A dark-chocolate colored plant with silver banding that Ray Coleman and I brought from Brazil a few years ago. The leaves are stiff and spiny in a tubular shape with the definitive ‘thumb print’ in the side. Just recently this plant was given a cultivar name by Eloise Beach, who called it ‘Rafa‘ after Rafael Oliveira deFaria who originally collected it near Sao Fidelis in Rio de Janeiro state, in 2001.

A miniature plant from Paraguay where it grows mostly as a lithophyte on exposed rocks. It has a thickly bulbous shape and short, sharply recurving spiny leaves. The color is green until blooming, when the plant blushes deep red to orange and produces red flowers. Grows well potted or mounted. It is quite cold hardy.

A legendary plant. When you look up ‘rare’ in the dictionary, you should see a picture of tayoensis. This plant has only been collected a few times in nature, in Ecuador and Peru. Most, if not all plants in cultivation came from these two collections. The most well know plant was Wally Berg’s which won the ‘Best in Show’ award at the Bromeliad World Conference in Orlando in 1996. At that same show, another plant was donated by the Marie Selby Botanical Garden and was auctioned off for $1,200.00 to a buyer from the Philippines. The plant is a large grower, to over 4 feet in diameter. The leaves are petiolate with a narrow spiny petiole and a broad, spineless leaf. The plants are green, tinted orange-red. The inflorescence is a spiny head of many recurving, orange-red bracts and yellow flowers and can last for a year or more. Grow warm and moist (not wet) in shade to bright shade.

A cultivar of the species, collected by Bob Whitman in Brazil. We got this clone from the late John Anderson. An upright, tubular rosette, green to reddish with bold silver banding.

The inflorescence is a head of clustered, intensely red branches and blue flowers. A relative of Ae. distichantha that makes a hardy landscape plant.

A bromeliad, rare in cultivation, native to the Guyana Shield formation of Suriname where it grows as a lithophyte on granite in the vicinity of Voltzberg.  Originally described as a species by L.B. Smith, it is now recognized as a natural hybrid of Aechmea aquilega and Aechmea moonenii.  A large grower with spiny, strap-like leaves of bronzy-green form an upright rosette to over three feet tall.  The inflorescence is nodding, with yellow branches in a loose cluster, and long pinkish-red scape bracts.  The flowers are deep yellow-orange.  Our plants originated from a field collection by Moonen and came to us from the collection of the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens (SEL2006-0109).