Australian and New Zealand Gardening: Bromeliads For Novices and Addicts - October 2014, 1 by splinter1804

splinter1804 wrote:
Hi everyone, well Brian anyway, come on the rest of you, out of bed and up and at ‘em.

Brian – I’m pleased to see you’re looking past the main flower in Shirley’s pic’s and by doing so you’ve obviously found what we already know and that is, Shirley is the “Queen of Colour” when it comes to Neo’s. Even her NOIDS are nicer plants than many we’ve seen winning at shows.

It’s surprising what you can often learn by looking past the main object in a picture and studying the background; it may be a particular type of bench construction, a method of supporting newly potted pups with no roots (that’s how I learned to re-cycle wooden chopsticks) or even some previously unknown ingredient of a potting mix. There’s always something new to be learned.

Now to try and answer your questions; your first picture isn’t a Billbergia, it’s an Aechmea nudicaulis. There are many different forms of these and some have beautifully marked foliage with barring or variegations as well brilliantly coloured bracts (see my Pic’s 1-3).

It’s a great time of the year now for nudicaulis on the east coast of Australia as they are all either coming into flower or have just finished. They are also an excellent plant for mounting on a tree and will quickly grow into a substantial clump.

Your next question about the Rosy Morn (Is this a flower?) The answer is no; it’s sometimes called a “flower head” by some growers and comprises all of the flowers in their various stages of growth from budding through to seed capsules.

The actual small mauve flowers can be seen in your third picture, the one at top right is almost open, the one below it is fully open and the ones on the left and at the bottom look like they have just finished and are closing up.

I don’t want to use technical terms which I’m not even sure of myself as this takes the fun out of things for we “back yard growers” and I’ll leave the technical stuff for the “experts”.

If however you want the technical names for all of these bits and pieces they can be found in the FCBS Glossary (all 44 pages of it) which can be found at: http://fcbs.org/articles/Glossary/Glossary.pdf

Because the flowers are often small and insignificant and the “bracts” are often brightly coloured, it’s often the bracts which are incorrectly referred to as the flowers. A bract is a leaf-like plant part often brightly coloured and located below the flower or on the stalk of a flower cluster. A common example of this is a Guzmania; take for example the Guzmania in picture 4. People often look at this and say “look at the nice red flower” when in fact the actual flowers are small and yellow in colour and peep out from between the red bracts and it’s the colour of the bracts that attract the attention initially.

I hope all of this isn’t too confusing and does help you to understand the various “bits and pieces” Time to go now and as well as the pic’s mentioned above, Pic.5 is Billbergia ‘Estrella’.

All the best, Nev.