Tillandsia inopinata Espejo, Lopez-Ferrari & W Till
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Comments:
- Notes
For a long time the Mexican specimens of the genus Tillandsia L. with digitate-compound inflorescences were identified with the name of T. fasciculata Sw. However, extensive work of gathering in diverse parts of the country has allowed us to determine that, under this epithet, they grouped several different species in fact, among those that we can mention are T. maritima Matuda (1971), T. hubertiana Matuda (1975A), T. flavobracteata Matuda (1975B), T. jaliscomonticola Matuda (1975B) and T. rothii Rauh (1976), as well as T. marabascoensis
Ehlers & Lautner (Ehlers, 1992), T. zoquensis Ehlers (2002) and T. macvaughii Espejo & López-Ferrari (2005), recently described. The inadequate application of the name T. fasciculata has surely been due to many of the characters in herbarium material being lost that allow us to distinguish the taxa appropriately with live plants, such as the number, the size, the colour and the form of the spikes, the consistency and texture of the floral bracts, the form of the rosette and the habitat. Mez, himself (1896) mentions that T. fasciculata was a polymorphic species and described seven varieties of the same one, using material from Mexico, the Antilles, Central and South America, and Florida in the United States. It is for the same reason that Smith and Downs (1977) in their Flora Neotropica recognized 10 varieties of T. fasciculata, two of them later moved to specific status byr Gardner (1984).
The type specimen of Tillandsia fasciculata Sw. (O. Swartz s. n., BM!, S(x2)!), comes from Jamaica and it corresponds to plants of small size (Chart 1) with plump spikes, ellipsoid and more or less short pedunculate (Fig. 5c). In Mexico, the populations that have these characteristics are found only in the Yucatan peninsula ( see Appendix) and the material coming from other parts of the country correspond to different entities, some of which have not been described to date. This is the case of the two taxa proposed here as T. grossispicata and T. inopinata: —See Acta Bot. Mex.
