"For years now Peter Franklin and I have been trying to find a true specimen of this plant. We knew there was a plant by this name being grown in Australia which had green ovaries, yellow sepals and yellow petals, and the leaves were often blotched red or purplish at the nipped-in-section between sheath and blade. However, Smith and Downs (Flora Neotropica Bromelioideae 1979, page 1925) describes the flower as "sepals tinged with red, petals red". We were looking, therefore , for red petals but could never find a plant to exactly match.
In November 1997 Len Colgan informed me that there was a photograph of an Aechmea nudicaulis v. aureo-rosea on the Web page of Charles Dills who is well known to those Bromeliad fans who "surf the Net". But were the petals red? They looked yellowish! Hmm!
In Baker’s Bromeliaceae (1889, page 63) Aechmea nudicaulis v. aureo-rosea has reddish-yellow petals, which had me wondering whether L.B. Smith could be wrong. Luckily the type specimen is not a dried specimen but had been based on a botanical painting made in 1881 which had appeared in the Vienna Illustrated Garden Magazine with a description by Antoine.
Who did I know in Vienna? I wrote to Walter Till asking him whether he could search for the painting and advise me of his findings.
It was a fantastic Christmas present to get a coloured photograph of the original botanical painting which showed L.B.Smith to be in error. The petals were clearly yellow with a red base, with the sepals and ovary being a dirty red. The written description needed to be translated from the German and this agreed with the photograph! Now we know what Aechmea nudicaulis v. aureo-rosea should look like and why it was so named.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of this saga is that Olwen Ferris (an Australian Honorary Trustee of the BSI) had this plant all the time and both Peter and myself had kept saying "You’re nearly right Olwen, it’s just that Lyman Smith says............!"
This plant is as described in Padilla’s book "Bromeliads" (1973) and in Baensch’s "Blooming Bromeliads" (1994) although Werner Rauh, in "Bromeliads for Home, Garden, and Greenhouse " follows Lyman Smith..
The true Aechmea nudicaulis v. aureo-rosea is in Australia and in the USA (see Charles Dills Web Page) but take care because the imposter we mentioned in the first paragraph is still around!"
