Orthophytum heleniceae

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Encholirium horridum x Hectia macdougallii

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Mr. Ray

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I dont see any photo's ..just red X's

Whoops, I tried to use bigger pictures than normal and I goofed it up.

Encholirium horridum x Hectia macdougallii looks like a dark naked lady

I'll take a 0. heleniceae.

Snip me off a pup of that Ortho, would you? One of my Holy Grail plants!

As to bigeneric crosses across tribe lines, I'd have to see the results (in bloom) to believe that. Sometimes alien pollen can trigger self-pollination and even polyploidy. I think John (bambi) has talked about that here before, as I don't really understand the mechanism. Such may have been the case with Ae. Little Harv, said to have been a chantinii pollinated with a Pitcairnea, but the flower and everything else on it is pure Aechmea, just steroid big. If there have been crosses between the Tillandsioideae and the Pitcairneoideae, show me the flower!

Is there a name for "bigeneric crosses across tribe lines", besides, "Notlikely"? I agree that the proof should be shown if it's been done. In the mean time, I'll waste a few minutes now and then crossing things that shouldn't be crossed.

I think Tropiflora will have heleniceae for sale soon. They have had it for a long while and Ray has been growing it from seed. Although, they may all go to an island in the western Pacific.

Good luck ordering from Tropiflora and getting what you order

Hechtia macdougallii is an old synonym for Hechtia rosea (current name). Stories abound about supposed trigenerics and crosses between Bromeliaceae sub-families genera, but NONE have ever been proven with photos of blooming specimens, nor ever been registered with the BSI's Bromeliad Cultivar Registry which records all cultivars (including hybrids) world-wide, not that all breeders register every cross they make--many are grand-fathered in if widely-grown and the hybridist will get no credit where unknown.

Trigenerics may be possible, if only because the constant taxonomic reshuffling turns some hybrids that used to be considered monogeneric into bigenerics, and vice versa. Where there used to be only Vrieseas we now have Alcantareas and Werauhias too. The dividing lines between Aechmea and Portea are fuzzy at best, and Aechmea itself may need to be split into a dozen different genera anyway. Then there's the ongoing musical chairs between Canistrum, Edmundoa, Wittrockia, Nidularium, Canistropsis, etc....... Meanwhile, the plants themselves haven't changed, only the nomenclature. Somewhere in all of this a trigeneric is bound to occur, if only in name only.

Crossing tribe/subfamily lines is a different matter, however. I'm not aware of those lines ever having been in question, and the differences between the three groups seem pretty distinct to me.