Introducing: Tillandsia cretacea by Harry E. Luther in J Brom Soc 49(4): 150. 1999.
Tillandsia cretacea L.B.Smith (cover photograph) is both a spectacular ornamental and a very interesting species from an ecological and ethnobotanical standpoint. It has one of the northernmost distributions of any large tillandsia: into subtropical Sonora and Chihuahua states in Mexico.
The earliest mention of this species seems to be by Howard Scott Gentry (1942) who collected the plant in 1935. This collection (Gentry 2032 at F) was originally misdetermined as Tillandsia inflata Mez, a name later changed, for nomenclatural reasons, to T. mooreana L.B.Smith. Gentry's plant was described as a lithophyte growing along the Rio Mayo in the Sierra Charuco of Sonora. This taxon was next encountered in Chihuahua in 1957. Based on this collection (Knobloch 564 at US) the new species Tillandsia cretacea was described by Lyman B. Smith in 1974.
In 1977, in the final installment of the South Bay Bromeliad Associates Bulletin, published as "Tales Of Spencer," Ralph Spencer (1977) writes about T. cretacea (as T. mooreana), a species he had been unsuccessful in locating in habitat but had seen in cultivation.
A few years later, the ethnobotanical collector Robert Bye, Jr. (1979) reported T. cretacea (again as T. mooreana) to be "a companion plant of peyote" and "Harming the bromeliad is considered to be very dangerous". His voucher specimens (Bye 2966, 6093 and 7096 at HUH) were gathered from 1972 to 1975 in the Barranca de Batopilas in the state of Chihuahua. Notes on two of the herbarium specimens state that the plant is "companion of peyote and the devil" (6093) and "touching the plant will cause one to go crazy" and "induces visions of many colors" (7096). This writer is still awaiting the colors portion.
The pictured plant was collected as a small seedling in 1993 from a steep-walled barranca north of Alamos, Sonora, Mexico, quite near to the much earlier Gentry collecting site. Flowering occurred five years later. The cultivated plant is only about 1/2 the size of the wild plants in habitat. I would guess that the plant might prefer cooler and drier conditions than those prevailing in Florida. At any rate, the inflorescence is spectacular and long lasting.
Although Tillandsia cretacea is quite uncommon in cultivation, artificially propagated plants are available from at least one California nursery. —SeeSmith & Downs 1977
