Stelis amabilis Luer & Hirtz 2007 SECTION Stelis

Drawing by © Carl Luer

LATE EARLY

Common Name The Beautiful Stelis

Flower Size .2" [5 mm]

Found in El Oro and Morona-Santiago provinces of Ecuador at elevations around 950 to 1600 meters as a small sized, warm to cool growing, long-repent-scandent epiphyte with slender, ascending-erect ramicauls with tubular sheath above the middle and 2 to 3 others at the base and carrying a single, erect, coriaceous, elliptical, obtuse, cuneate below into the petiolate base leaf that blooms in the late summer and early fall on an apical, erect, dense, 2 ranked, to 4 to 6" [10 to 15 cm] long including the .8” [2 cm] long peduncle, mostly simultaneously many flowered inflorescence arising through a spathe from an annulus below the apex of the ramicaul and has conspicuous, oblique, acute, longer than the ovary floral bracts.

"Characterized by a stout, creeping rhizome and ascending ramicauls, an elliptical leaf and a densely many flowered, two-ranked raceme that is about as long as the leaf. The sepals are broadly ovate and obtuse, the petals are transverse and concave and the lip is thickly rounded with a broadly obtuse, apical margin and a large glenion." Luer 2007

Synonyms

References W3 Tropicos, Kew Monocot list , IPNI ;

* Icones Pleurothallidinarum Vol XXIX A Third Century of Stelis of Ecuador Systematics of Apoda-Prorepentia Luer 2007 drawing fide

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