Alcanterea Imperialis

The full story behind this rare plant

We started growing bromeliads commercially over twenty years ago, in those early days of collecting we would buy anything that came our way bromeliads were not as common as they are today. This plant was acquired during that time we have no idea were we bought it or when, what we did know was that the plant would take a long time to flower we planted it in the garden and left it along with the green clones we got during that time. We had never had one of these plants flower for us and had only seen one in flower in all our years of collecting so when the plant showed signs of pushing up a spike it was a celebrated occasion. It didn't take long before we realized that this was a very different plant to anything we had seen before the flower was turning this deep burgundy all the other imperialis we had seen were dominantly green with a little red splashed through the leaves. The flower continued to grow to a height of over eight feet making it the largest bromeliad we had flowered. The flowers self pollinated and set seed and we grow the seed on till we had small plants to sell. It was when we started offering these plants to the collectors in the bromeliad society we found that no one really knew what it was called, it was clearly not the rubra that most people had but didn't have a name or description to separate this plant from the green rubra. We first called it discolour as it had the burgundy under the leaves and the blue gray on top then we learnt that these plants grow in full sun this in turn produced a purple colour in the stronger light and this is were we seem to have come up with the best name purperea. The other place this plant seems to have turned up is New Zealand we think that it is the same clone. One of the unique things this plants does is when it has flowered it dies with out any pups this makes the plant all the more valuable as we no longer have the plant that you see in the photo and have no pups to grow on unlike most bromeliads. Other imperials have been know to produce small secondary pups (looks like grass) but this clone has been reluctant to give off these little offsets. Through bromeliad societies and retail nurseries we have sold hundreds of these seedlings but the batch is coming to an end until another plant flowers and seed is collected there will not be this sort of numbers available. We have a number of large plants left with the smaller ones going fast it will be many years before any of these plants come to flower. All this detail might be a bit much for some however we do get asked a lot of questions about this plant because of the confusion with name and the fact that it is so different to the rubra.