Maurice Kellett tells us he got the plant in 1971, which Professor Eizi Matuda called P. hartwigii.
Let us now read Maurice's diary for 18/4/1971 in Mexico:
"We travelled first to the Valley of San Pedro, where we walked down into the valley where a power station was situated. The trees were covered with many Tillandsia imperialis in flower. Many other bromeliads were also in flower. I remember seeing large plants of something like T. leucolepis growing in the ground amongst the grass. On the rocks, but impossible to collect, were large flowering plants that looked like T. parryi. We saw native Pitcairnia in flower and collected Mammillaria, a small Echeveria, and many native sedums, etc.
We based ourselves in the town of Zacatlan, in the State of Puebla. Interestingly, the Valley San Pedro does not relate to the river San Pedro, which is on the western side of Mexico! After leaving Zacatlan we called into Chignahuapan, which is not far away, and also into Puebla. Many years before in Chignahuapan someone had seen an image of the Virgin Mary on the bark of a pine tree and they built a church around it. Such faith and ingenuity!! When we saw it, it was a pile of rubble because a cow had walked onto the roof !!
We collected a Pitcairnia near the Power Station. I asked Dr Matuda, who had organised the trip, to write down its name as his mixture of spoken Japanese and Spanish was sometimes hard to understand. He obliged with P. hartwigii on a scrap of paper."
Back to 2002!
I have been trying to obtain just a little piece of this plant, to see if I could link it to a currently described species from Mexico. If the plant was described under another name, this could account for why P. hartwigii did not get published, and this is how I could achieve my aim!
Just to show how fervent some South Aussies can be towards bromeliads, Len Colgan had arranged a trip to Teesdale, Victoria for the weekend of October 26/27. Apparently Rudi Schultz had an open day! It meant an 8 hour drive there, and an 8 hour drive back for a 3 hour visit! Thanks to Email I was able to warn Chris Larson (who only had to travel from Melbourne) that I would love to see a P. hartwegii in the flesh!
I digress because Chris mentioned that Len Summers was there, too, AND I found out that Len had some plants in his car. I pleaded with Len for him to remove the inflorescence from his P. hartwigii so I could take it home and take it to pieces! "Sorry, Derek, but the flowers are not open yet, and probably wouldn't open if you did cut it off!" Disappointment! Anyway I made it to Len's car so I could see this mysterious plant. Len treated his plant with care as he lovingly got it from the back seat. Then he knocked it against the door and half the inflorescence on one plant fell off. My eyes lit up and Len's fell! He was soon his happy self, and I got half an inflorescence to take home. He must have been in a generous mood because I also got an offset that Len squeezed out of the same pot. This offset is now potted up in Adelaide, where I must remember the Summers' motto "Feed it, feed it, feed it"
Back to the flower bit I had. The next day, on my return to beautiful Adelaide, I got to work. Admittedly I had to guess the petal status, but I did have a photo from Chris Larson to help me. I had pieces of flower all over the place. I just could not fit the plant into Lyman Smith's key and in desperation tried every description of any Pitcairnia found in Mexico. Again nothing. Perhaps this plant was new after all. Perhaps we will have to wait for the Mexicans to again find this plant in the wild and properly describe it.
In the meantime I am going to de-Latinise the name to 'Hartwig' and put it in the Bromeliad Cultivar Register, where you can see its photo.
P. 'Hartwig' grows well in Melbourne and appears to be restricted to Melbourne (except for my little offset).
July 2005
I now know it is not restricted to Australia because 2005 saw Chas Dills of California enquiring about his P. hartwigii. How on earth had the plant got to the USA? On enquiry I found that Maurice Kellett had sent a plant to Jim McQueen in Tasmania (of all places). Jim had flowered his plant and thought it so good, sent seed to the BSI seed bank in the early 1980's.
Now that this plant is widespread it is all the pertinent to get it properly identified. It is all the more reason to find out the sort of seed it produces to see if there is a link to the sub genus Pepinia sensu Smith."
