Nice to see PBS posts arriving again; the list host cut me off for a
couple of weeks.

I've grown a couple of Puya species (and flowered one of them, as I recall
in about 8 years) and have admired a number of others in South America. I
don't grow them any more because (1) they are not hardy outdoors here in
Portland, Oregon; (2) if grown in a container, it would eventually have to
be far larger than I could move (in particular, P. raimondii gets
gigantic); and (3) they have vicious hooked barbs on the leaf margins and
you don't want to get too close to them. When I moved my potted ones
outdoors for the summer, I had to wrap a tarp around the plant to avoid the
fishhooks.

The UC Berkeley Botanical Garden suffers frost rarely, and then it usually
isn't severe (barring what happened in 1990/1991, when plants all over the
Pacific Coast froze to death). More important, you can't translate
elevations in the Andes directly to North American USDA "hardiness zones."
At more temperate latitudes, the plants are likely to spend their winters
snug under the snow, and as you get nearer the Equator, temperatures even
at what seems (especially to a resident of the Atlantic coast) as very high
elevation are relatively moderate, perhaps freezing at night and thawing in
the daytime.

So my opinion is, don't try them outdoors in Boston! And if you want one
in your greenhouse, look for a smaller species, such as P. venusta (which
has beautiful glaucous foliage and purple flowers). In my experience the
seeds germinate readily.

Jane McGary

Portland, Oregon, USA

On 12/25/2016 8:19 AM, Paul LICHT wrote:

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