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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
entry from field notes dated May 5, 2023, taken about 150m uphill on NE-facing slope, above intersection of road from Hwy 120 to San Joaquín, with road to El Doctor; juniper and pine forest on limestone bedrock; elevation ±2425m (7950 ft); Eastern Sierra Madre mountains of east-central Querétaro state, MÉXICO, (N20.88°, W99.62°)
BLUE ECHEVERIAS
Sheltering between two large rocks in a narrow space usually in deep shadow, the above little colony of wildflowers were in full bloom, despite it being at the end of an exceptionally long, severe dry season. Such clusters of small, cabbage-like rosettes were reminiscent of the ornamental pot and garden plant Sempervivum, sometimes called hen and chicks. Sempervivum is a member of the Stonecrop Family, the Crassulaceae, so already this was a beginning to the identification process.
The inflorescence rose above its rosette of leaves as if inspired by the same impulse responsible for the graceful necks of swans.
Up close it was clear that these plants were not a species of sempervivum, whose corollas develop 8-16 lobes, and whose sepals below the corollas are all alike. The above corollas are 5-angled, and the sepals reach slightly different lengths. Also, sempervivums are Eurasian plants, not American.
The inflorescence's pink peduncle sprouted off-center in the rosette, and each silvery-green/glaucous leaf was tipped with a raspberry-colored tooth.
In upland central Mexico if you have a member of the Stonecrop Family with rosette-forming leaves, the flowers' partly tubular corollas possess no scale-like appendages at the inside bases of the lobes, and the corollas are noticeably angular in cross-section, you have the genus Echeveria. In English Echeveria species often are referred to as echeverias. The genus is named in honor of a Mexican botanical artist of the 1700s named Astanasio Echeverría y Godoy, and his Echeverría was pronounced accenting the í, and trilling the rr, but nowadays not many account for that when pronouncing the differently spelled "echeveria."
About 250 Echevaria species currently are recognized, and they're all native only to the Americas from Texas south to Argentina. With Mexico the genus' center of species diversity, in our central upland Mexico region known as the Bajío, about 18 species are known. Of those, if your echevaria's flowers are arranged in a raceme (each flower with a short stalk, or pedicel, arising from a central stem), with blossoms tending to gather on one side of the flower stem (secund), the flowering stem itself is thicker than 1cm (3/8inch), small bracts (modified leaves) on the flowering stem are flat and less that 15mm long (7/16inch), and the rosette leaves are almost circular, or at least not somewhat narrow to narrowly arrowhead shaped, then you have ECHEVERIA SECUNDA.
Echeveria secunda, sometimes named Blue Echeveria, is endemic just to several states in central upland Mexico, from Guanajuato and here, south to Puebla and Tlaxcala, at elevations from 1800-3400m (5900-11,200ft). They occupy habitats ranging from scrub and oak and pine forests, to subalpine meadows. In the mountains where our plants occur, they're not uncommon in high, rocky, hard-to-reach places, despite the tendency for people to dig up such pretty plants.
The Flora del Bajío remarks that Echeveria secunda is a species of great genetic and morphological plasticity. The plants vary markedly in appearance, and occupy environments from sheltered, shaded niches like ours, to very exposed locations with intense sunlight, plus they root in substrates from deep soil to cracks in rocks. Those in subalpine meadows obviously can survive cold temperatures.
This flexibility, along with the plants' attractiveness, explains why in much of the world the species is a popular potted and garden plant. Several commercial cultivars have been developed, and are sold under such names as Painted Lady, Plush Plant, Wax Rosette, Copper Rose, Maroon Chenille Plant, and others.
It's always a pleasure to see anything that's beautiful, maybe even fragile looking, but also tough and able to survive both good and hard times, and this is one of those beings.