Androlepis skinneri

Plate 1 figs. a–f · 3 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 3 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Androlepis skinneri, photographed by Lena Struwe — fig. a Lena Struwe, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2010-02-24 / obs. 12622630

Androlepis skinneri, photographed by Annika Lindqvist — fig. d Annika Lindqvist, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 178031940

Androlepis skinneri, photographed by Eric Knight — fig. e Eric Knight, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 4731981

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium: The New York Botanical Garden
Accession: 85692
Filed as: Androlepis skinneri (K.Koch) Brongn. ex Houllet
Det. by: L. Smith 1988-01-01
Collected: M. J. Balick 1987-11-16
Origin: BZ
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 7 botanical countries

Native distribution of Androlepis skinneri, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Belize	BLZ	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Costa Rica	COS
Guatemala	GUA
Honduras	HON
Nicaragua	NIC
Mexico Gulf	MXG	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Southeast	MXT

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Where it actually grows measured, from 64 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	14.8 °C	17.9 °C	21.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	27.6 °C	31.2 °C	34.1 °C
Annual rainfall	1,549 mm	2,259 mm	4,227 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	127 mm	184 mm	418 mm

It is not found anywhere that gets close to freezing. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 64 research-grade observations of Androlepis skinneri that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 5 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Aechmea donnell-smithii Baker
Aechmea leucostachys Baker
Aechmea skinneri (K.Koch) Baker
Androlepis donnell-smithii (Baker) Mez
Pothuava skinneri K.Koch

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.