This plant was imported from Costa Rica. The leaves are a soft green until flowering, when the whole plant turns a deep red. We keep it in the heated growing-on house. It flowers each summer, has only one offset, and refuses to set seed.
This one was from Mexico, and has quite a different leaf form than the Costa Rican plant above. Also, the red flush lasts much longer. AB 357 loses its leaf color within a month of flowering, but the leaves of AB 311 are still colored more than a year later. If you look at the first two photos of AB 311, the plant on the left with seed pods flowered a year ago, and the one on the right is its offset flowering this year (May 2000). The green color of the bottom part of the leaves is the normal color of the whole plant before flowering.
Tillandsia abdita and Tillandsia brachycaulos are very closely related, and hard to tell apart.
