SANCHEZ-MEJORADAE Walther, 1972 (engl./ fr.)
Series Urbiniae
Type : From plants originally collected by E. Walther along road from Venados to Zacualtipan (see Note below), Hidalgo, Mexico, cultivated by Victor Reiter. CAS 414603.
Etymology : Named for Hernando Sánchez-Mejorada.
Distribution : Mexico (Hidalgo)
First Description by Walther in Echeveria,108-109, 1972 :
Plant glabrous, stemless, cespitose, with even small, young plants consisting of two or more rosettes.
Leaves numerous, crowded, linear-oblanceolate to obovate-cuneate, long-attenuate to base, at apex aristate-apiculate, slightly recurved, obscurely keeled beneath, to 6 cm long and 15 mm broad. Colour spinach-green, not glaucous.
Inflorescences three to five, sometimes to 50 cm tall, simply secund-racemose; peduncle slender, flexuose, light yellowish olive; bracts distant, oblanceolate, aristate-acute, subtriquetrous, to 20 mm long, colour as leaves, but tinged army-brown.
Flowers 10, spreading; pedicels to 9 mm long, vinaceous-fawn to army-brown; sepals very unequal, longest to 11 mm long, acute, spreading to ascending, deltoid to lanceolate, colour as bracts; corolla urceolate, 11 mm long, 8 mm in basal diameter, 5 mm at mouth, jasper-pink at base, javel-green above; petals not at all keeled, nor hollowed, colour inside javel-green; carpels 7 mm long, light lumiere-green; styles apple-green; nectaries narrowly lunate, oblique, 2 mm wide, light lumiere-green.
Cytology : n = 60, 62
Link to a description in French.
Note :
1. Walther prepared this description in 1959, shortly before he died. However it took 13 years until it was finally published in his posthumous book Echeveria in 1972. Until that time contemporaries only knew that Walther had collected a new species along the road from Venados to Zacualtipan in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and that he had decided to name if for Sr. Hernando Sanchez-Mejorada.
In autumn 1959 Reid Moran collected plants in the same region, they had solitary rosettes with glaucous leaves. As they had been found near the type locality Walther had indicated, it seemed likely that they corresponded to Walther's E. sanchez-mejoradae and they were distributed with this name. Because Walther's description was not accessible a verification was impossible.
When - finally - in 1972 the description was made public, E. sanchez-mejoradae as a plant with solitary rosettes and glaucous leaves was so well established that apparently nobody checked the protologue and the erroneous identification was not detected.
This means that from the very beginning the name E. sanchez-mejoradae was used for two distinctly different plants :
- Firstly and correctly for Walther's freely offsetting plant with spinach-green leaves said to have come from the above mentioned locality and
- secondly and incorrectly for a plant with a solitary rosette with whitish leaves evidentially from the same region – clearly an impostor as it does not correspond to Walther’s description.
Unfortunately Walther's plant has never been found again in the wild. Either he has not remembered correctly the locality or – more likely – the plant he has described as E. sanchez-mejoradae had been confused in Reiter’s garden where it was cultivated.
Conclusion : The name E. sanchez-mejoradae solely applies to a stemless, freely cespitose Echeveria with spinach-green, not glaucous leaves which has never been found in the wild again. Whether it is still existing is not known.
The Echeveria species with a solitary rosette of glaucous leaves, erroneously called E. sanchez-mejoradae, is in fact nothing else but E. hyalina.