Very, very nice! Thanks for sharing them. Great to see in habitat.

tj

Hi Andy,

Brilliant stuff. And what a great place to foist onto an unsuspecting taxonomist!

Cheers, Paul

Ha ha, yeah, I agree Paul. I am digging through all of the botanical descriptions and trying to figure some of it out. It looks like the Green and green/red shiny ones with the larger spines might be either H. podantha or affiliated genetically. So there are at least two species (if not more) in there.

There is a pretty active academic group in Mexico that seems to be doing a lot of work on the genus. I would love to talk with them and compare some notes. Unfortunately a lot of their articles are only published in Spanish...but between my modest Spanish, familiarity with academic articles, and the pictures I have done pretty well interpreting their papers.

I adjusted some photos to show the 'trunk' of that one hechtia better. The pictures still don't show it all that well...
Contrary to some people's assertions that hechtias aren't worth anything because some are center bloomers doesn't quite hold with these spectacular plants!

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Far out - the elephant in the room! I couldn't see it at all before because I was looking for something that wasn't anywhere near that big. Thanks for the eye-opener!

In my opinion, there might be more than a number of Hechtia species.

Within 10 square metres of our tropical jungle in Thailand, you could find
10-20 different species of Dendrobium orchid. I think the specific pollinator could be
the natural species control.

Incredible! I wonder if everything started growing from the bottom up on the wall or the other way around.

I think the seeds might be dispersed by the wind up to the cliff.
Hechtia seeds are really teeny, they need no parachute like that of Tillandsia or Vresea to fly.

Great photos! I've been planting Orthophytum, Dyckia, Hechtia and Puya in my dry hillside garden here in SoCal. This raises my hopes that some of them will establish themselves nicely.

I wish I could find some clones of aregentea that are as silver as many of those are.

Wow!! Thank you for the pictures! That was amazing!

Rena'

Hi Andy,

Thank's once again for taking us on one of you bromeliad adventures into their natural habitats.

As far as I'm concerned it's second only to actually being there.

Fantastic stuff, don't ever stop and thank's again for sharing.

All the best, Nev.