Guzmania berteroniana(Schult. & Schult.f.) Mez

Bertero's tufted airplant

WFO wfo-0001218660 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Guzmania berteroniana, photographed by donbull
fig. a donbull, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-02-17 / obs. 180278341

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
1024854
Filed as
Guzmania berteroniana (Schult. & Schult.f.) Mez
Det. by
L. B. Smith 1989-01-01
Collected
B. M. Boom 1988-01-11
Origin
PR
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 3 botanical countries

Regions where Guzmania berteroniana is native: Dominican Republic, Panamá, Puerto Rico Dominican RepublicPanamáPuerto Rico
Native distribution of Guzmania berteroniana, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Dominican Republic DOM SOUTHERN AMERICA
Panamá PAN
Puerto Rico PUE

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.

Flowering 75 in flower of 78 examined

Proportion of examined Guzmania berteroniana in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 12 12 100% 76% to 100%
Feb 15 15 100% 80% to 100%
Mar 3 3 too few examined
Apr 4 4 too few examined
May 8 8 100% 68% to 100%
Jun 6 6 100% 61% to 100%
Jul 8 8 100% 68% to 100%
Aug 3 5 60% 23% to 88%
Sep 3 3 too few examined
Oct 3 4 too few examined
Nov 3 3 too few examined
Dec 7 7 100% 65% to 100%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Guzmania berteroniana observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 75 of 78 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 296 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 15.5 °C 18.2 °C 21.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.1 °C 25.7 °C 28.7 °C
Annual rainfall 1,792 mm 3,117 mm 3,184 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 239 mm 507 mm 519 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 296 research-grade observations of Guzmania berteroniana 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. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

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.

  • Caraguata berteroniana Schult. & Schult.f.
  • Caraguata grandiflora Baker
  • Devillea speciosa Bertero ex Schult. & Schult.f.
  • Tillandsia caraguata D.Dietr.
  • Tillandsia devillea Steud.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol GUBE2. public domain. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.