Let us look at the plant in question. The name alone makes you want to buy the plant because it means globular tongue which must really make your imagination run wild when linked to a Bromeliad! It is a prickly beast which is reticent to flower but makes up for this by offsetting profusely. If in the previous 15 years you have visited Len you probably would have been offered an offset and instructed, "Let me know when it flowers!". So it must have been spread around Australia and either the recipient was so disappointed with the flower or it did not flower because nothing was said. Aechmea sphaeroglossa has never appeared in any list anywhere.
In 2003 Maureen Hick, here in Adelaide reported happenings and I waited with baited breath for the call to photograph it. Alas, no phone call but Maureen did let slip in 2004 that the flower had aborted in the November hot weather. I was told that the petals were blue and on examination the flowers had not aborted. Those who complain about the speed with which billbergias flower had better get this plant for comparison!
I took the post-floral inflorescence apart and took high resolution scans on my Canon Scanner. Clearly the plant was in the sub-genus Lamprococcus and the closest I could get was Aechmea podantha but there were several discrepancies. So I sent detail to Harry Luther who felt it was close to and could be a hybrid with A. victoriana.
So Aechmea sphaeroglossa is still undescribed and it looks as though it will remain so. Elton Leme has come across so many hybrids from Seidel that he will not describe them unless he finds the plant himself in the wild.
I could find no globular tongue and the inflorescence is nothing to shout about. I will be entering this name on the species data base held in http://fcbs.org as a nomen nudum and linking it with photos. I am doing this not so much because it is a plant one would want but rather the reverse!
If you do not have access to the Internet the plant can be described as being a funnel-form rosette to 60 cm high. Leaves are rigid, light red to red brown in good light, narrow triangular, with lots of spines on the edges and a sharp point at the tip. The top face has appressed trichomes and more so underneath where they seem to be in longitudinal lines. The inflorescence is erect and if you can picture it, half-way between A. podantha and A. victoriana!!!"
