Stelis cyathiformis Luer & Hirtz 2004 SUBGENUS Stelis Duque 2008
TYPE Drawing by Carl Luer and The Epidendra Website
Common Name The Cup Shaped Stelis [refers to the cup shaped lip]
Flower Size .24" [6 mm]
Found in Azuay province of Ecuador at elevations around 2800 meters as a mini-miniature sized, cold growing, caespitose epiphyte with erect, slender ramicauls enveloped by a tubular sheath and another at the base and carrying a single, apical, erect, coriaceous, narrowly-linear-elliptical, acute, narrowly cuneate below into the petiolate base leaf that blooms in the fall on an erect, arising through an annulus from below the apex of the ramicaul, 6" [15 cm] long, subcongested, distichous, mostly simultaneously, many flowered inflorescence with oblique, broadly infundibular, longer than the ovary floral bracts and carrying purple flowers.
"Characterized by a slender raceme of small, downward facing flwoers that exceed the very narrow leaf. The sepals are purple witha long, dense pubescence, especially at the tips. The lateral sepals are more or less direected forward. The lip is spherical and deeply concave butthe thin margins are not incurved. The bar is deeply cleft centrally and callus dorsally." Luer 2004
Synonyms
References W3 Tropicos, Kew Monocot list , IPNI ;
Native Ecuadorian Orchids Vol 5 Dodson 2004 drawing/photo fide
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