#1 could be Neoregelia 'Painted Lady'
#2 is on the tip of my tongue!
#3 Billbergia. Maybe 'Pink Patches' grown in too much shade or 'Pink Champagne'
#4 A form of Neoregelia carolinae, possibly 'Meyendorffii'.

#1 Neo. 'Lambert's Pride'

#2 (top left) Not sure, but I'm kind of leaning towards Quesnelia.... possibly Q. arvensis?
(top right) Looks like Ae. 'Friederike'
(bottom) One of the many variegated Neoregelias, possibly Neo. 'Sheba'

#3 Billbergia, but not ringing a bell. So many of them look similar under low light conditions.

#4 A bunch of Neos, but really hard to say which ones.

Under the 'Lambert's Pride' bottom right is a gathering of Neo. ampullacea that need more light to bring out their spots. The gray-brown cluster with the red tips in #2 looks similar to Aechmea pineliana var. minuta, also needing a tad more light.

And MOST all the Neo's look over watered..hard to make an intelligent guess with 2 important growing factors out of sink

Went and checked Ae. pineliana v. minuta on the files, gonz (the pineliana we have here is a different form), and I think you may be right. #2 does look more like that than a Quesnelia.

A flower in a picture is a huge help, and a full-grown plant in good light is much easier to identify than an immature one with weak coloration, especially with Neoregelias, because there are so many hybrids (thousands).

Not to get off track, but yesterday a woman asked me "Do you have that big bromeliad?" Which one? "It's from Brazil." What color? "I don't know....green?" Form? Did it have a flower? Was it spiny or smooth? "Oh, I don't remember. I saw it in a shop. Don't you have that one???"

*sigh* I'm just not cut out for sales...

LOL LisaCLV..my next question would have been why didnt you buy it in that shop

That's good Lisa! :-). Had a neighbor who used to bug me like that too. So, to get him to leave me alone...One day he noticed I had a baseball bat planted in the middle of my veggie patch. Asked me why? I sez so I can grow an Ash tree. He thought I was crazy and said so and went his way. The next week I glued some evergreen Ash branches to the backside of the bat. Voila! No more nosey neighbor.

Lisa I know how you feel. I get that all the time too. The best one I have had in a long while was when Heather at Tropiflora in Sarasota called me up this summer and said they had a customer who was looking for a specific "torch" ginger that he just could NOT locate. He was "getting desperate" and thought he might have to "import it from Hawaii" (yikes!). He lives in Sarasota, so I figured if he couldn't locate it down there in So FL the chances of ME having it were pretty miniscule. But I called him up anyhow and he starts talking about this torch ginger he wants and how he wants to grow it in big containers out by his pool and do I have any? So I say, "We are talking about Etlingera elatior here, right?" and he says, "Well, uh yeah I think so" so I told him the 4 varieties I have and said that I could sell him maybe 2 rhizomes at the present time of 3 or them or maybe 4 of the other which I have more of, and he asks,"What's a rhizome?" SO then I KNEW we were in trouble here.

I explained what a rhizome is and told him how he'd have to grow the plant basically from scratch and it would most likely be 2-4 years before he got blooms. Then I said, well, you know Sarasota is pretty far North to be trying to grow this particular type of ginger outside, are you planning to protect it, and how because it will eventually get 18-20 ft tall? And he was like, well, what do you mean by protect it?

You get the picture. It went on and on like this for, oh, at least 1/2 hour. We finally ascertained that he didn't really know what he was looking for by name, only that it was red and "looked like a torch". So I figured he meant ALpinia purpurata. I emailed him a photo of that and he said YES that's it! But, he didn't want rhizomes, he wanted 3 gallon POTS full.

So I said to him, you know, you live in Sarasota. You can probably go to ANY good independent nursery around there or down in Miami area and get some nice specimens of this plant, probably blooming, for a good price.

He didn't want to do that. He wanted MAIL ORDER. SO he ended up paying me to ship him two 3 gallon containers of Red A. purpurata via OVERNIGHT UPS "because he wanted to buy it from me because I had been so nice". Not that I am complaining, but gosh!

Sounds just like the questions asked in this forum. Makes you wonder how knowledgeable the garden centers are that these people have purchased their plants from. Cuz we know if we gave someone a plant we would tell them best ways to care for that plant...now wouldnt we?

We get the "Torch Ginger" thing all the time too, Bihai. For some reason, at least half of the people I've talked to mean Alpinia purpurata when they say that, and I don't know why that is. These are very common plants here, but they still don't know.

Another one is heliconias-- to an awful lot of people, "heliconia" seems to mean H. psittacorums only, and the big uprights they'll call "Bird of Paradise". Or they'll ask for "Sassy Pink". I tell them, well, there's Sexy Pink and there's Sassy, but no Sassy Pink. "Oh, I want the Sassy", but then you show it to them and they say "No no, not that one, the pink hanging one." Sexy Pink. "Yeah, Sassy Pink". They can't bring themselves to say the word "sexy", especially the little old ladies!

One guy wanted me to tell him he could grow that one in a pot on his (sunless, windy) lanai. I tried to discourage him, as H. chartacea is one of the more tempermental species anyway, and it particularly doesn't like wind, and even under the best conditions wouldn't bloom in a pot unless it was a really big pot. The more I tried to talk him out of it, the more he kept saying "But what if I...?" until finally I just told him to go ahead and try it if he wanted to. That seemed to make him happy. I try to be honest, but a lot of times they don't really want that.

And if I hear another person talking about bromel-AIDS, or "air plants" I think I'll scream! Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!

This isnt the forum for bromel-AIDS? LOL

I need a Bromo-seltzer!

Yes, I killed a total of three Sexy Pinks before I called it quits. I have also killed a Barnum and Bailey and a Xanthovillosa Shogun. Fortunately the Shogun was a trade and I didn't spend $150 or more fo rit.

I get questions like, "you know that plant that grows outside? My kid ate some I think. Will he die?" When you ask them to describe it you get stuff like, it's green, it kind of looks like grass, it has berries-I think. I should have been a detective! Tally HO!

We're getting really off topic here, this isn't even about bromeliads, but my favorite question was when I was working at Paradise Park, a tourist came up and said "what is that palm tree that has a flower like a hibiscus?" I said I'd never seen anything like that. "Yes you have, it's all over the place! It's got, like, a guava or something coming out of the middle of the flower." I was becoming pretty intrigued by this point, so I asked her to show it to me...

It was a banana!