Australian and New Zealand Gardening: Bromeliads for Novices and Addicts - September 2014, 5 by splinter1804

splinter1804 wrote:
Hi everyone – The weather hasn’t improved greatly and it’s been raining on and off throughout the night. I just hope it eases off a bit this morning so I can load the car with my plants for the meeting today.

Brian – It’s good to see you back again, being new to the group I thought you may not have realized we moved to a new thread. I’m relieved to see you again today as you and I are the only two blokes here at the moment. We do have another couple of male members, one we haven’t heard from for a while and Ian who is currently busy moving himself, wife and all of his plants to another location. (If you’re reading this Ian, it’s time you gave us another SITREP), we’d be pleased to hear from you.

Brian, you say, “will be good to get some tips from the pro's”; unfortunately, there are no pro’s in our society, we are just a group of brom lovers and back yard growers from different walks of life enjoying our plants. However we are a friendly lot and willing to share what knowledge we have with others willing to listen.

As for our interest in brom’s, well I can just speak for myself, but I’ve been interested in gardening in one form or another for the last sixty years. I started in orchids when I was about twelve and saw my first brom in a display at an orchid show. It wasn’t until a young adult I was given my initial couple of brom’s and I grew them along with the orchids. I then included growing ferns into my hobby as I found that orchids, brom’s and ferns make good companion plants. As I grew older my interests changed and bird breeding became my main hobby until after a few years I had aviaries all around the yard, but I still had a few ferns and brom’s in my old shade house.

Eventually shift work began to interfere with my bird breeding and I gradually sold all of my birds and replaced them with more and more bromeliads. Now, all the old aviaries have been converted to shade houses and brom’s are my main hobby. (Incidentally, the plant in your third picture, Aechmea gamosepala is the first brom I ever bought); I think it is one that most of us have, or have had in our collections at some stage of our brom collecting.

That’s a nice array of colour in your first picture, can you supply names for the plants? I’m especially curious about the two very dark coloured ones. Do you have a name for the Neo.?
The other dark one looks a bit like a Canastropsis ‘Plum’ or one of its hybrids. What has me a bit “tossed” though is what looks like pups around the base, and although they are a similar in colour, the leaf shape looks more like those of a Neo.?????

Is that a xNeophytum 'Ralph Davis' in the front of Pic.1? What’s the trick to getting the great colour? Come on, share your secret with us; i.e. level of light, potting mix, fertiliser etc.

Moving now to the first picture of your Mum’s garden and the plant that immediately “jumps out” at me is the Aechmea pineliana minuta in flower (Bottom right). That colour is typical for this particular plant, but more importantly, I’ve been told that plant is now extinct in its natural habitat. That’s why it’s so important that we try to grow it and multiply it as much as we can so that it never dies out.

There are two forms; the standard form is similar in all aspects except it is a larger plant at about twice the height of the Aechmea pineliana minuta which as the name (minuta) indicates is small. There are also a couple of different colour forms, and as well as the most attractive of the two (like the one in your picture) there is also another (See Pic.1) with a less appealing colour. The flowers of both forms are yellow and short lived, however the brilliant contrasting scarlet bracts stay in colour for much longer.

It has been around in collection’s for many years (supported by the fact that it was previously grown by your Grand Mother) and it’s an easy plant to grow and one that could come under the category of “thriving on neglect”. It just needs good light and good drainage; it’s as simple as that. The reason it has become extinct in the wild is not due to being hard to grow but the result of massive land clearing in its natural habitat.

I saw a fantastic picture of it once growing in a Queensland grower’s garden where the grower had put a clump on the roof of a small garden shed intending to re-locate it to another area. He had forgotten all about it and when he went to retrieve it a few months later, found it had started to grow onto the iron sheeting. He left it there to see what would happen and after several years on the hot roof in the Queensland sun, it had almost covered the entire roof. I am a bit “dirty” on myself now for not asking for a copy of the picture as it was a magnificent sight.

I can’t definitely identify any of the other plants except to say, the variegated plant next to the pineliana could be one of the early variegated forms of Neo. carolinae, with its thin leaves, on the other hand it may just be a clump of Ribbon Grass.

You say in the second post, “Don't know what happened there”, but after a while you’ll get used to it as Dave’s Garden often does things to pic’s we have no control over. Sometimes they won’t attach, other times the “Choose a file” button isn’t there, sometimes they just vanish, never to be seen again and the same thing can also happen with the typed text. To save having to do it all over again when this happens, a lot of us type it first on Microsoft Word and then “cut and paste”, that way if D.G. swallows it up you still have the original.

Pic.1 today is the other form of pineliana which isn’t as pink as the better form. Some say the difference in colour is just due the amount light it’s grown under, but I have both forms and have grown them side by side and still both colours are different. Pic.2 is Guzmania ‘Broadview’ which was bred from Guzmania lingulata as the seed parent and although it’s no “world beater”, the bracts stay in colour for up to a year, so well worth growing. Pic.3 is Nidularium ‘Litmus’, an interesting Nidularium, so named because it changes colour just like the litmus paper we used at school and as it matures it eventually changes into a mauve/bluish tone. Pic.4 is Bill. Sanderiana which is now out in all its glory and Pic.5 is a (slightly blurred) Ae. Wyee (Unreg.) which I'm told is a hybrid from gamosepala.

All the best, Nev
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