POSTCARD from Mexico N°1

(By Fernando Rivadavia, October 2003) 

I first tried to find P.esseriana in the municipality of Cadereyta, on the road from Vizarron to San Joaquin. I found the exact spot high on the mountains (~2300m) where 2 herbarium collections were made in Feb/March, when there were flowers. Unfortunately however, I could not find any plants. Apparently they were rather rare and I guess without the flowers they're a bit difficult to find, especially if they were dormant already. The area where they supposedly grew was grassy with sparse trees.

I then went down on the other side of these mountains to look for P.elizabethiae. I'm almost sure I was at the right place (~1000m), but again I found nothing. It was amazingly dry and hot, with cacti and other xerophytic plants growing in rocky soil. I would've never imagined Pinguicula growing there.

Frustrated, I drove back up the mountains, down again to the other side, and then headed N to Landa de Matamoros, where there is a famous P.agnata site just after a town called La Lagunita. Where the road starts going up the mountains, the right side of the road is pure cliff, where the road was cut into the mountainside. There is a ~4km long stretch at ~1400m where all the N-facing cliffs are completely covered with P.agnata. At first I didn't see them because they were RED! Not only was I expecting yellow, but my partial colorblindness doesn't help... Well, in shadier areas the plants were orangish or greenish. The leaves were really thick and succulent, the flowers were white to light-lilac with the petal tips (just the edge or up to half the petal) bluish. It was an amazing site with millions of plants!

I was really hoping to see P.calderoniae, but the road climbed only up to ~1300m, while this species was collected at ~2000-2300m. I explored a few roads going up the mountains, but don't think I found the right one. I later saw that both known collections of P.calderoniae were made on the same day by Zamudio, one in Queretaro and the other in S.L.Potosi. So they must've been close to each other. I did find one road on my maps from where a trail crossed from one state to the next. I believe this was probably the right place. Next time maybe....

I headed back to La Lagunita, towards the P.agnata site, but before I reached it I noticed some yellow rosettes which turned out to be P.moranensis. After a few seconds standing in front of the rosettes and taking pictures, my colorblind eyes finally adjusted themselves and I realized that more abundant than the yellow rosettes were dark-red rosettes of P.moranensis! They were beautiful! A bit further down there was a place where P.moranensis grew with P.agnata, but then P.moranensis disappeared and P.agnata took over.

At La Lagunita  I took a side road to Acatitlán de Zaragoza to search for P.lilacina. Supposedly they'd been collected at a place called Los Zotanitos in a pino-encino forest, but I didn't find this place nor did I see this kind of forest. And I didn't find P.lilacina either. What I did find were more P.moranensis, again with either yellow-green or dark-red rosettes, also growing on N-facing cliffs by the road. 

I continued driving back along the same road, past Landa to Jalpan, where I took a road NW to Arroyo Seco, turning off to the W before this town, taking a dirt road to a town called La Florida. I was hoping to find P.lilacina and P.macrophylla. It was raining and foggy, the road really slippery. When I was at ~1300m, near the expected place for P.macrophylla just before La Florida, I saw once again yellow and red rosettes of P.moranensis growing on the banks by the road. I got out to look at these and decided to go for a walk since it was a pino-encino forest above the road banks -- the habitat described for P.macrophylla. But instead of this species, I found P.lilacina!

They were growing among grasses at the edge of a cow pasture, where it met the pino-encino forest. The rosettes were smaller than I remembered from herbarium samples and right off I could tell from the fragility or the plants that it's an annual species. Most of the plants were still seedlings, but there were several flowering specimens too, although all the flowers were closed for some reason. Could it be that  like Drosera they only open up their flowers in sunny weather?? The petal tips were lilac, while the tube was yellowish with dark-red streaks.

From this site I drove a little further along the road past Florida, to search for the P.lilacina site I was originally looking for, but gave up along the way because of the bad weather. I couldn't even see through the fog what kinds of habitats were present along the road. So I returned to Mexico City, arriving there nearly 10pm, partly due to the heavy weekend traffic. Anyways, I was really happy with the 3 species I saw, but nonetheless frustrated with the ones I missed. I realized that P.moranensis is really easy to find, since it grows on the roadsides, but apparently other species are not so easy and one must know their particular habitats in order to find them, or maybe just be there at the right time of year in order to SEE them.

Take Care,

Fernando Rivadavia