The Bromeliad Craze Blooms On

The Bromeliad Collectors

The Diverse Family of Flowering Plants Continues to Capture the Imagination of Louisiana Collectors

Story by Kristy Christiansen • Photos by Paul Christiansen

In an unassuming neighborhood in Kenner, ranch houses fall in line one after another. Their perfectly-manicured front lawns hint at similarly designed backyards, 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.

Paul Christiansen

There are more than fifty genera and three thousand species of the family Bromeliaceae. The terrestrial species 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 retirement, 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.

Paul Christiansen

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 bromeliads. The two formed the Louisiana Bromeliad Society in 1954, with Hobbs serving as the first president and Knobloch the second. Hobbs’ bromeliad etchings graced the covers of many of the Society’s early bulletins, and the Bromeliad Society International’s as well—an organization that he was also deeply involved in.

Hobbs expanded his collection to Mandeville, where he painted watercolors for his never-completed book, Bromeliads and Birds of Tropical America. Meanwhile, Knobloch purchased Mary Plantation in Plaquemines Parish in 1946 and landscaped the property with his rare collection of bromeliads. Charles Birdsong, current president of the Baton Rouge Bromeliad Society, remembers him well.

“As a kid, I would go to the Knoblochs’ with my mom,” said Birdsong. “I lived in New Orleans, where we raised bromeliads and orchids. There were not many places you could buy them back then.” His mother was Knobloch’s realtor, said Birdsong, and they quickly developed a friendship. “Foster would bring a lot back from South America. He would hybridize them and shared a lot with Knobloch, who shared them with my mom.”

Regional interest in the exotic plants continued to grow, but the Louisiana Bromeliad Society maxed out its membership at thirty-six. So Knobloch helped with the founding of a second group, the Greater New Orleans Bromeliad Society, in 1971. A year later, the group boasted one hundred and fifty members.

“It was a fever,” said Garman. “At one time, we were at UNO [University of New Orleans]. We had to close out membership at two hundred because there was no room big enough.” After using flower show judges for their shows for many years, the members decided that the particularities of bromeliads required a more specific set of expertise. “We became the first bromeliad judges in the world,” she said. “We would conduct our very own judging schools the same as other societies had in the past. Later schools were conducted in the States, and then overseas. Now I am the last of the original bromeliad judges.”

Birdsong started his own collection in high school in the 1960s. He went to college at Louisiana State University, and as soon as he moved off campus, brought his bromeliads to Baton Rouge. Since then, the collection has grown to over six thousand plants. He recalled that at the time, his mom had tried to join the Greater New Orleans Bromeliad Society but was turned away because there was no space for new members.

Birdsong took the natural next step and helped launch the Bromeliad Society of Baton Rouge in 1975. “I’m the only active charter member left,” he said. “I served every office and have been president for seven or eight years. I’m the benevolent dictator,” he laughed. Birdsong has also held the position of director and currently serves as affiliate shows chairman of the International Bromeliad Society.

Today, the bromeliad focus has shifted from the Southern United States to Australia. Birdsong’s daughter married an Australian, and Birdsong visits the couple every other year for the Australasian Bromeliad Conference, going through countless hoops to export bromeliads back with him to the states. Many of these have made their way to Garman.

“They have these hybrid minis you’d go nuts for, and you can’t get them here,” said Garman. “Oh, I love them to death. These plants make me so happy. They make me want to get up in the morning.”

The bromeliad craze may have waned in Louisiana since its heyday in the 1960s and ‘70s, but it’s far from over. The local societies continue to meet once a month and encourage interested parties to check out their Facebook pages to learn more. After a hiatus due to COVID, they are each gearing up for their annual shows in May and June, leading up to the World Conference, which kicks off June 7 in Sarasota, Florida. You can also purchase bromeliads at Don and Shirley’s in Thibodaux or at the many plant shows they attend.

Bromeliad Society of Baton Rouge Meets on the second Thursday of every month at 7 pm at The Baton Rouge Garden Center, 7950 Independence Boulevard Baton Rouge, LA 70806

Greater New Orleans Bromeliad Society Meets on the fourth Thursday of every month at 7 pm at The Old Metairie Library, 2350 Metairie Road Metairie, LA 70001

River Ridge Bromeliad Society Meets every first Thursday of the month at 2401 43rd Street Kenner, LA 70065

Don & Shirley’s Nursery 1022 McCulla Street Thibodaux, LA 70301 facebook.com/LouisianaBromeliads (985) 447-7088