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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
from the October 1, 2017 Newsletter issued from Rancho Regensis north of Valladolid, Yucatán, MÉXICO
ECHEANDIA FLOWERING
Especially along forest trails nowadays you can find what's shown below:
Note the lily-like rosette of leaves at the base, and the large head of widely spaced flowers reaching out over the trail, seeking light. Up close, a flower reveals a particularly elegant design, shown below:
Notice how the stamens' yellow anthers are fused with one another along their sides, forming a cylinder held aloft on five pale, somewhat flattened filaments. The filament bases are narrowed so that an open space forms between them, and you can see through those spaces the green, spherical ovary in the flower's center. Notice how the pale style extends its pollen-collecting stigma beyond the yellow anthers. This is really a graceful blossom.
The plant is ECHEANDIA LUTEOLA, in the Agave Family, the Agavaceae. It has no good English or Spanish name. It's endemic just to the Yucatan Peninsula, probably including Belize and northern Guatemala, so if you want to see it, you just have to come here.