PINEAPPLES & MOSS
The Bromeliad Craze Blooms On THE DIVERSE FAMILY OF FLOWERING PLANTS CONTINUES TO CAPTURE THE IMAGINATION OF LOUISIANA COLLECTORS Story by Kristy Christiansen • Photos by Paul Christiansen
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n an unassuming neighborhood in Kenner, ranch houses fall in line one after another. Their perfectly-manicured front lawns hint at similarly designed hbackyards, wedged into typical city lots just large enough to buffer each home from the one next door. But Bryan Windham’s house, tucked away on a side street, holds a secret: an expansive backyard running the length of four other homes. Step outside of the cookie cutter suburban dream and onto Windham’s hidden property, and you’ll find two large greenhouses shielding a tropical oasis of more than five thousand bromeliads. “About twenty-two years ago, I went to a craft fair in Canton and bought my first bromeliad,” said Windham, who now serves as the president of the River Ridge Bromeliad Society. He purchased the fated flower from Don and Shirley Leonard, owners of Don and Shirley’s Nursery in Thibodaux and frequent vendors at many festivals and plant shows around Louisiana. “I brought it home, joined the River Ridge Bromeliad Society, learned more, and it turned into this.” Walking the rows of his greenhouse, where bromeliads are packed in tightly on tables and cling to support posts, Windham picks up one bromeliad after another, rattling off genus names like Vriesea, Aechmea, Tillandsia, and Billbergia. They each have labels, but he doesn’t spare the slips of paper a glance, having long since committed the flowers’ names to memory. There are more than fifty genera and three thousand species of the family Bromeliaceae. The terrestrial spe-
cies grow in the ground—one of the most well-known being the pineapple (Ananas comosus)—while saxicolous species grow on rocks. Epiphytes, known as air plants, latch on to trees or telephone poles (though they are not parasitic). One common South Louisiana epiphytic bromeliad is Spanish moss. Bromeliad leaves generally grow in a spiral, or rosette, pattern, and range in color from various shades of green to maroon and white and yellow. In the case of most mature bromeliads (it can take a year or more for the plant to reach maturity), a flower stalk sprouts from within the rosette, shooting out a vibrant, flowering display. Each bromeliad only produces one flower, and once the flower dies, the plant begins its own cycle of dying— which can sometimes take up to two years. In the meantime, though, baby plants, or “pups,” will grow from the mother plant. Windham is serious about his collecting, growing many of his own plants through hybridization. He demonstrates by meticulously extracting pollen out of one plant and placing it in the stigma of another. “After pollination, it will produce seeds that germinate and grow. I collect the seeds, sow them, and as they mature, I separate them,” he said. “Every seedling has the possibility of producing a new plant. I would go over to Michael’s Nursery in Florida—he has ten acres of greenhouses—and I would bring back a truckload of plants. Now, I’m selling to him.” With plans to launch a bromeliad business after retire-
ment, Windham is leading the Southern bromeliad trade into the future, carrying on the traditions of the early bromeliad pioneers, such as Mulford Foster, Eric Knobloch, and Morris Henry Hobbs. Foster, a New Jersey botanist who moved to Florida in the 1920s, repeatedly traveled to South America and the Caribbean to collect various species of plants. In the wild, bromeliads grow almost exclusively in the American tropics, largely in South America. Over the course of his many travels, Foster found and brought between one hundred and seventy and two hundred new species to his home in Florida. He ran the Tropical Arts Nursery in Orlando and spent much of his time cultivating and hybridizing bromeliads. His name is uttered with hushed reverance by anyone possessing the slightest knowledge of bromeliad history, including Jeanne Garman, a longtime member of the Greater New Orleans Bromeliad Society. “In the fifties, he collected and hybridized more bromeliads than anyone,” she said. Garman herself has spent over fifty years collecting bromeliads, trading in her stockpile of larger varieties for her beloved miniature neoregelias after moving from Lakeview to the banks of Bayou St. John in New Orleans in 1987. It was Foster’s friend Eric Knobloch, a botanist at Tulane University, and the Louisiana artist Morris Henry Hobbs who helped to bring the bromeliad craze to Louisiana. Both members of the Patio Planters group in the French Quarter, they filled their courtyards with // M A R 2 2
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