| How I would love to spend some time in those montane forests of Colombia! I stayed 3 days in some at over 10,000 ft in Costa Rica 5 years ago, and that was magical. I guess you are well aware that these are among the world's biodiversity hotspots, and the great majority of plants from them will be quite unknown to gardening people. The flowers in your first pic look very like Calliandra, which has around 200 species in the Americas. But the leaves look like they are from an unrelated plant. Calliandras all have compound leaves, basically bipinnate but sometimes reduced to very few leaflets. The leaves give some of the best clues to identification. Your second pic is of one of the neotropical-montane genera of Ericaceae. Try a Google image search on Cavendishia. Once the possibilities have been narrowed down, I find the Missouri BG's W3TROPICOS database very useful for researching neotropical plants. You can look at all the botanical collections cited and find the ones that have been collected from the area and habitat you have visited. Its weaknesses include a failure to distinguish between native, naturalised and cultivated status, and lack of facility to search by region or family. |
