Le Jardin Ombragé Presents

Specializing in the Plant Family Costaceae

The map above is a map showing the locations of my field observations looking for plants in the family Costaceae. During the past 20 years I have made nearly 40 trips to thirteen different countries in Latin America to look for these plants known as "Spiral Gingers". To see photos and read the descriptions of these field observations, go to https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?&user_id=selvadero (Sorted by observation date. Click on the thumbnail to see details.) Note that the species names on many of these observations have not yet been updated for the changes in the taxonomy published in our 2026 article in the peer-reviewed journal Blumea because iNaturalist has not yet adopted the changes.

Many of these trips were directly focussed on regions of the early type localities where plant explorers had found the holotypes of species that were described over a hundred years ago. Usually their collections of dried specimens in European or American herbaria lacked enough detail of the flowers and their published descriptions were incomplete making the interpretation of the species difficult at best. The objective of many of my trips was to find living plants in the type localtiies that match the herbarium specimens and to take photographs of the living plants and measurements of their flower parts so that we could correctly interpret the original collections.

These pages record the stories of my many adventures looking for these plants. I describe the places I visited and the people I met as well as the plants I found.

February 2026 - Some of the trips were published on my old WordPress site which is no longer functional. It will take me a while to finish restoring or writing about all these trips, but you can click on the links to the left to read about the ones I have completed or partially completed (in purple font).