Anwyl Bromeliads   plant names

Summary

You will notice that many of the plants displayed on our site have numbers as well as, or instead of, names. We do this because most of our stock are "wild plants" - they have not been sorted and selected for uniformity, and then propagated by humans so they are all practically identical. This has major consequences:

• there will be variation among plants with the same name, just like there is variation between human races.
• Botanists are continually reviewing and revising the classification of wild plant populations. Inevitably, they need to change the names of some plants.
• To obtain new varieties, and conserve some that becoming rare or dying out in their native habitats, we raise most of our plants from seed. Sometimes the name on the seeds is wrong, but we don't find out until one of the plants flowers - which could be fifteen years later! 
•  Sometimes we make a mistake and get a name wrong.

We are always trying to get the correct name on our plants. This means, we are going to change the name sometimes. We don't want our customers buying the same plant from us twice because we have changed the name, and you think you are buying something new when its not. To try and avoid confusion, we do the following:

• we assign our own  number to the plants we sell, as well as the plant's name.
• when we find out a plant name is wrong, or botanists change the "official" name, we change the name on our plant but not the number.
• following a name change, we note the change on our name change page and also announce the change on our plant detail pages for both the old name and the new name.

Detailed discussion

to follow!