Tropicals & Tender Perennials: Tropical Plants and Gardens #116, 1 by dyzzypyxxy

dyzzypyxxy wrote:
Bromeliads are wonderful plants if you have dry-ish shady areas where nothing else wants to grow. They come in a huge array of sizes, colors of flowers and colors/patterns of leaves. Take a look on this website http://www.tropiflora.com and click on Bromeliads. You will be blown away by the array of beautiful plants. btw, this nursery is here in Sarasota and I have to restrain myself when I go there, to not go and walk through their huge shade houses, or I come home with a car full of (expensive) Broms.

A key to growing them is to know that each rosette of leaves only makes one flower. Then it becomes a 'mother' plant and makes pups which will then grow up to bloom, too. If you let them get too crowded, they will then stop blooming, so you need to divide them and spread them around. When you do this, you should eventually discard some of the mother plants that are getting scruffy. They're really easy to divide because they have hardly any roots. You just pick them up and pull them apart and put them back down on the ground again.

Sometimes if you have a variety that has decorative leaves, you don't mind the lack of blooms because the leaves themselves are a nice feature. You can leave them crowded and they will choke out weeds and be good looking all by themselves. I'll post some pics of a few that I have here in my garden, hope others will show theirs, too.