When visiting the fantastic collections and gardens of Roberto Burle Marx back in 1975, I collected seed from a Neoregelia that had been collected by Margaret Mee some ten years earlier. Needless to say, I brought the seeds home and planted them. Many seedlings developed, from which I distributed young plants to many of my favorite bromeliad growers. I started hearing that the seedlings resulted in beautiful specimens but we could not put a name on them. My own plants finally matured and it was obviously an undescribed species. Not wanting to publish a new species without knowing its place of origin, other than cultivation, I waited.
Ten years after collecting the seed we had beautiful plants blooming in the Smithsonian Botany Department Greenhouse. Staff artist Alice Tangerini illustrated it as I was preparing to describe it and name it for Roberto. Unfortunately my studies of Neoregelia faltered. Somewhere along the way the manuscript was lost in the piles of unfinished projects and I put off publishing hoping for a miracle.
More recently while in Brazil visiting with Elton Leme I learned that my "Neoregelia burlemarxii" had been found in the Mountains above Sao Paulo. I now have a wild collected plant to compare with my collections. The wild material is much smaller with narrower leaves, but is otherwise the same taxon. Another plant in my collection came labeled as a hybrid with N. tristis. I immediately suspected a relationship with my Burle Marx seedlings, but it was not until the Leme plant flowered that the relationship was obvious. The so-called hybrid resembles the wild collected materials so close as to be identical. I think the hybrid designation was a guess considering the narrow leaves and similar markings on the leaves of N. tristis.
Subspecies meeana represents the form discovered and illustrated by Margaret Mee in 1964, and resembles closely the more recently rediscovered material from Maranduba, Sierra do Mar, Prov. Sao Paulo —SeeRead 1996p. 46(6): 261-264
