Peru's Coolest Plants
July 8, 2010
Buenos Dias from Lima, Peru:
Our guide Guillermo Rivera has done a great job of finding us nice hotels at affordable prices, including internet service. Isn't it cool that I can sit here so far away and write and send photos? Technology is wonderful. See Guillermo in some of the attached photos, by the way.
As promised, here are pictures from yesterday, which are of Puya raimondii (which has no common name, really), the largest bromeliad on earth. This plant grows for about 60 to 75 years as a rosette of leaves, eventually forming a trunk up to 15 feet tall and 10 feet wide. During this entire time, it does not bloom at all. When something tells them they're ready, they flower, sending up one of the world's largest inflorescences, which can reach another 20 feet or more tall, making the entire apparatus upwards of 35 feet in some cases. I have photos to prove this, although the floral spikes are from last year and are in seed. Take a look-see. Aren't these spectacular?
After producing a fantastic show of creamy white flowers with bright orange stamens, they die. But not before producing up to 6 million or more seeds per plant. Hopefully just one of these seeds will survive to establish and continue the species in place of its parent. And therein lies the dilemma for the species - very few seeds actually do manage to accomplish this, and this iconic plant that symbolizes the nation of Peru is in serious decline over time, as new seedling recruitment fails to replace the dead adults at a sustainable level.
Populations of Puya raimondii are located in only a handful of Andean valleys, mainly in Peru (with a few in Bolivia), and all of them are too far apart to interbreed with one-another, leaving an archipelago of genetically isolated populations fragmented across hundreds of miles. Some of these populations consist of only a few dozen plants, whereas others number in the thousands, but basically the plants are rare, high-altitude endemics. They were probably once more common than they are today, and their future looks uncertain with the impacts of climate change and grazing pressures from humans inhabiting their valleys with sheep and cattle. These photos were taken at exactly 14,000 feet in altitude, as measured at the parking lot. I am reminded of how thin the air becomes up there....
I did manage to collect some seeds of this plant, using my hat and a fellow photographer's tripod to knock them loose. I will try to grow a few of my own, although it's a bit improbable that these cool-climate alpine plants will appreciate Arizona's summertime heat and might not survive long-term. But more likely I should be able to sell some of them online via eBay or my website. According to some online research I did a few weeks before I left and repeated last night, seeds of this plant are much in demand, with almost no supply available.
It does seem a little weird that with these Puyas producing millions of seeds per plant that they are so rare and hard to come by. But if you consider it further, it makes some sense. The plants bloom only once in 60 to 75 years, and all those seeds are available in one massive dose, rather than being spread out every year for decades on end, as is more typical for long-lived perennials like these. Guillermo says that the population shown here bloomed en masse last Sept 2009, and that it's unusual to have so many plants flowering all at once. Then there's the matter of the inherent inaccessibility of their native montane habitat in remote Andean valleys, and that they are naturally rare and declining anyway.
Adding all those factors together, and you have a situation where seed demand in cultivation isn't being met. I'll see what I can do to both remedy this as well as capitalize upon it. Some people have paid as much as $5.00 PER SEED for 10 seeds, and I managed to collect perhaps 2000 of them. Now I don't necessarily expect that I will actually get that kind of pricing for them, but you never know. No one in the US seems to have them, and certainly not in any quantity; therefore it seems virtually assured that I can make at least a few hundred dollars, and probably more. That will help pay for the trip. I hope. :-)
So that's the word from the southern hemisphere today. I have to turn in. Tomorrow we go from Lima to a place called Tarma, once again located at about 9,000 feet altitude in the Andes. So in the last week I have been from sea level to 14,000 feet and back three different times. Such is the nature of travel in the Andes. You absolutely would not believe the roads in this country, and where they have been placed - scary isn't really the word for it....
More later on the trip, I am sure. Good luck to all.
Jan
