Add a touch of the exotic in your garden with colorful and surprisingly versatile bromeliads. Dozens, if not hundreds of kinds of bromeliads are offered in nurseries and at society sales. They range from the tiniest, clumping Tillandsia, the so-called “air plants” whose icy green, tentacle-like leaves collect moisture and nutrients from the air. Their roots are basically non-existent.
Bromeliads add a touch of the exotic to any garden
How bromeliads grow
Like Tillandsia, many bromeliads grow as epiphytes attached to trees or other plants, often in humid rainforests.
Some terrestrial bromeliads are adapted to growing in the rich leaf litter of shady forests; others to harshly sunny, sandy beaches. Their roots to absorb water and nutrients from the soil
A third category, the saxicolous bromeliads, attach to rocks, often on sheer cliff faces. Like epiphytic bromeliads, they gather water and nutrients from the atmosphere.
Bromeliads in your garden
Tillandsiaare fun to collect and display while many larger bromeliads make wonderful landscape plants for gardens that don’t freeze. In cold gardens, grow bromeliads potted in a protected spot in a courtyard or under an eave. In the ground, in a pot, or growing as an epiphyte, you’ll be surprised at how little water bromeliads require.
While bromeliads have beautiful flowers their foliage is their real claim to fame. Stiff, broad leaves are arranged in spiral rosettes. They range from tall, narrow vases to broad, flat rosettes with leaves so tightly arranged to form “tanks” where water collects. Each becomes a tiny pond with its own community of insects, amphibians, reptiles, and even small vertebrates. Tank bromeliads absorb nutrients from the critters’ waste as it accumulates in that stagnant water.
Leaf color is even more varied than shape. Some bromeliads are bright shiny green, others intense burgundy red; some deep bronze almost black, others flocked icy green. Some leaves are marked in squiggly bands of red, or with burgundy horizontal stripes on a green background. Others are vertical striped, green and yellow.
Leaves are the “big show” when it comes to bromeliads.
As each bromeliad vase matures, flower stalks form in the center. Some flowers are so small, you need a magnifying glass to see them. Other stalks are many feet long, upright or pendant. Flowers can be shockingly bright, neon orange to indigo blue, electric pink to canary yellow.
After each vase flowers, it forms pups (new side plants). Eventually the “mother” plant dies, leaving its family behind.
Bromeliads for beginners (and not so beginners, too!)
Eighteen-inch tall Billbergia nutans forms a lovely long, pendant stalk of peppermint pink and periwinkle blue flowers. Start a few clumps in a pot; soon, it will be completely filled.
Bilbergia nutans is bromeliad that is easy to grow in Southern California gardens
Neoregelia ‘Fireball’ is a small bromeliad, with rosettes not more than 10” tall and wide. The leaves are bright, bright red, and the flowers are tiny purple specs in the center. These beauties make large colonies in coastal gardens.
It’s fun to share bromeliad cuttings, like these Neoregelia ‘Fireball’, which grow in low, broad colonies.
Dyckia are mounding terrestrial bromeliads, two feet tall by three feet wide. Grow in full sun so the wickedly spined leaves develop deep red/burgundy or metallic silver. Scary, but well worth growing, far from a path so no one gets hurt. Flowers are bright to deep orange.
Terrestrial Dykia bromeliads have wicked spines so plant them well away from walkways.
Spanish moss is a Tillandsia whose green leaves are covered in tiny white scales that create a silvery surface. Drape Spanish moss over a tree branch in gardens along the coast. Inland the air is too dry and winters too cold for this beauty,
Long, silvery strands of Spanish moss (Tillandsia) hang from trees in more humid regions
— Nan Sterman
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