Brachionidium rugosum Luer & Hirtz 1986

Photo by © Alexander Hirtz

TYPE Drawing Drawing by © Carl Luer and The Epidendra Orchid Website

LATE EARLY

Common Name or Meaning The Rugose Brachionidium [refers to the leaf]

Flower Size .7" [1.75 cm]

Found in Loja province of southern Ecuador in cloud forests in scrubby vegetation at elevations around 3200 meters as a miniature sized, cold growing epiphtye with a slender, ascending to erect rhizome enveloped by 2 to 3, minutely mucronate sheaths and giving rise to slender, suberect ramicauls enveloped by 2 similar sheaths and carrying a single, apical, suberect, thickly coriaceous, purple beneath, dorsally longitudinally rugose-verrucose along the 5 to 7 veins, subdenticulate above the middle, elliptical, subacute, cuneate below into the petiolate base leaf that blooms in the late summer and early fall on a slender, erect, arising from near the apex of the ramicaul with a bract below the middle, .28 to .32" [7 to 8 mm] long, single flowered inflorescence as well as an inflated, mucronate, as long as the ovary floral bract and carrying a translucent green veined and suffused with brown, non-resupinate flower.

"Closest to Brachionidium galeatum but distinguished by the more slender rhizomes without scabrous sheaths, a non-cucullate synsepalum and glabrous sepals and petals." Luer 1995

Synonyms

References W3 Tropicos, Kew Monocot list , IPNI ; Native Ecuadorian Orchids Vol 1 Dodson 1994 drawing/photo fide; Icones Pleurothallidinarum Vol XII Systematics of Brachionidium Luer 1995 drawing fide; Flora Of Ecuador # 76 225[2] Dodson & Luer 2005; Orchids of Peru Zelenko & Bermudez 2009 photo fide;

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