BELLA fa BELLA

Type : MacDougall s.n. (NY). Plant collected winter 1938/39 near San Cristobal Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, (referred to as E. B-6 in his fieldnotes),

Distribution : Mexico (Chiapas : San Cristobal Las Casas and near San Felipe Ecatepec, Zinacantán, Nabenchauk).

First  Description by Alexander in Cactus and Succulent Journal US 13(8): 133-135. 1941 :

Plant caespitose and freely offsetting.

The rosettes dense, 2 - 4 cm in diameter.

Leaves 1.2 - 1.8 cm long, narrowly oblanceolate, acute, 2 - 4 mm wide, bright yellow-green, not at all glaucous.

Inflorescence 10 - 20 cm tall, erect, its bracts very different from the leaves, 18 mm long and 5 mm broad, becoming reduced upwards, acutish, the upper ones somewhat glaucous as also is the reddish rachis; flowers 4 - 12 in a multilateral raceme, the pedicels reddish, 6 - 10 mm long, occasionally 2-flowered, the two bracts linear, 2 - 5 mm long.

Flowers : Calyx yellow-green, somewhat glaucous, the tube 1 mm long, the lobes spreading, linear, obtuse, nearly equal, 3 - 5 mm long; corolla 8 - 10 mm long, orange-yellow flushed with rosy-scarlet especially on the upper side, campanulate, sharp-angled in bud, blunt-angled in flower, the lobes spreading apart nearly to the middle, the tips recurved; stamens opposite the petals 5 mm long, those opposite the sepals 6 mm long; carpel-cluster broadly ovoid, 7 - 8 mm long, the carpel bodies pale greenish-yellow, stigma and styles bright green, the styles 2 mm long; nectarine gland white, 1.5 mm broad.

Cytology : n =  15

Note :

1. Instead of going back to the First Description by E. Alexander, M. Kimnach in Illustrated Handbook of Succulent Plants, 2003, based his summary of E. bella on E. Walther's re-description in Echeveria, 357, 1972, which however- apart from being obsolete - is useless because it is made from “plants cultivated by V. Reiter, Jr. San Francisco, obtained from Dr. J. Meyran, Mexico City, 1959” - that means from plants without known origin. Moreover E. Walther died on July 1, 1959, so cannot possibly have been able to describe a plant only received from Dr. Meyran in 1959 by V. Reiter but already cultivated in his garden ....

2. The text in Flora Mesoamericana is likewise of no use because it is also based on Walther's re-description.