Puya alpestris | BotanAI

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 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.

Puya alpestris, photographed by nmoorhatch — fig. a nmoorhatch, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-03-21 / obs. 183957627

Puya alpestris, photographed by David Gutiérrez — fig. b David Gutiérrez, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 182436120

Puya alpestris, photographed by Javier Conejeros Gastó — fig. c Javier Conejeros Gastó, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 26291409

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: 201214
Filed as: Puya alpestris (Poepp.) Gay
Det. by: C. R. Annable 1995-01-01
Collected: C. R. Annable 1995-03-01
Origin: US
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. We link to the digitised sheet rather than rehosting it, because the holding institutions do not serve their images to third parties reliably and we are not going to show you a picture we cannot actually deliver. 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 sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 1 botanical country

Native distribution of Puya alpestris, 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
Chile Central	CLC	SOUTHERN AMERICA

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 313 in flower of 350 examined

85%

43%

25%

50%

71%

83%

91%

95%

94%

96%

Proportion of examined Puya alpestris in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	17	20	85%	64% to 95%
Feb	3	7	43%	16% to 75%
Mar	2	8	25%	7% to 59%
Apr	4	8	50%	22% to 78%
May	5	7	71%	36% to 92%
Jun	5	6	83%	44% to 97%
Jul	21	23	91%	73% to 98%
Aug	32	35	91%	78% to 97%
Sep	57	60	95%	86% to 98%
Oct	74	79	94%	86% to 97%
Nov	50	52	96%	87% to 99%
Dec	43	45	96%	85% to 99%

Peak flowering in Nov. Each bar is the share of Puya alpestris 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. 313 of 350 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 432 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-2.6 °C	3.0 °C	10.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	17.7 °C	24.9 °C	29.4 °C
Annual rainfall	140 mm	636 mm	2,355 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	3 mm	9 mm	108 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 432 research-grade observations of Puya alpestris 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 4 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.

Pitcairnia alpestris (Poepp.) L.H.Bailey
Pourretia alpestris Poepp.
Puya pumila Ravenna
Puya whytei Hook.f.

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.