Totally tropical – and just right for front room
Once upon a time if you wanted to see bromeliads, you needed to visit a tropical house at a stately home or fly off to warmer climes where they are quite at home in a variety of sites and situations.
Such is their ability to make the most of what’s on offer that they can be found from sea level to more than 14,000 feet, from hot, dry deserts to moist rainforests.
Characteristically, the best-known bromeliads are shallow-rooted with flowers that are usually small and insignificant – and many live in trees. To be more precise, most live on trees where they thrive shaded from direct summer sun and exist on decaying foliage and pooled water. On the jungle floor they would struggle for light and have to fight other plants for that precious food and water.
So these epiphytic varieties produce hard, wiry roots with which they anchor themselves into clefts between branches or onto the branches themselves and the trunks where they capture water and nutrients.
But now there’s no need to visit a stately home or travel thousands of miles to see an epiphytic bromeliad – one variety is fast becoming one of the more popular exotic house plants grown in the UK.
Guzmania lingulata is renowned for its brilliant pink or red flower bracts but it can also be found in shades of yellow and orange. The true flowers are white and keep their heads well below those colourful bracts.
Guzmania lingulata is an ideal indoor or office plant. It can survive in poorlylit areas, although it doesn’t like direct sunlight. Partial-shade, like that found in its normal habitat, is ideal.
Clever plants, epiphytic bromeliads. Even more amazing are lithophyte bromeliads that live in or on rocks where they feed off nutrients from rainwater and nearby decaying plants, including their own dead tissue.
Very clever plants, lithophyte bromeliads.
And then there are the terrestrial bromeliads which keep their roots firmly on – and in – the ground.
Not quite as clever, terrestrial bromeliads, but still successful.
And probably the most famous of all bromeliads is the pineapple, which Christopher Columbus discovered when he was sailing around the West Indies.
Very interesting plants, bromeliads.