Garden Design and Landscaping: Bromeliads

One of the best specimens used in garden design and landscaping is the plant world’s greatest shape shifter – the bromeliad. Bromeliads range from prickly pear looking pineapples to moss like Spanish yucca to the eccentric dyckia. Bromeliads, as any garden design and landscaping expert will tell you are tough and thrive on any environment.

Native to the South American regions, bromeliads can be found swinging from trees and clinging to rock formations and are abundant in the rainforest terrain. The only edible bromeliad, the pineapple is grown for its rich tasty pulp and was first introduced in Europe in the 1400’s when Columbus brought it back from his second world voyage. There are approximately 3000 species of bromeliads that have been identified and are cultivated worldwide. Bromeliads are excellent for garden design and landscaping because of their adaptability to any environmental condition, they can thrive both indoors and outdoors with minimal grooming and assistance.

Bromeliads have an inherent aesthetic characteristic that they carry. Blooms often have vivid, articulate leaves with epiphytes that do not require soil, with a unique characteristic of using roots as an anchor instead of a resource for gaining nourishment. Some of the most celebrated bromeliads in the world of garden design and landscaping are:

Billbergia and Aechmea – often called the tanks because of the look they conceive. The bulky bloom nature is from storing water in the cupped matrix of the leaf rosettes.

Neoregelia and Vriesea - also considered tanks but are more vibrantly colored and exhibit a pattern in their foliage.

Tillandsia- is primarily considered as an aerobic plant and is characterized by its curly appendages and rhizome looking extensions that they used to cling to objects.

The Bromeliad Whisperer- David Shiigi

David Shiigi is renowned in the area of garden design and landscaping because of his successful and memorable hybrid bromeliads. Shiigi became enthralled with bromeliads in the 1970’s when he was just a student at the University of Hawaii. On a routine visit to a plant nursery, he stumbled on his first bromeliad and fell in love with it because of its unique symmetry and bold coloration. Because of his newfound fascination to this pineapple relative, he ordered seeds from South America and utilized local bromeliad growers for seedling starts. After his first year of cultivating bromeliads, he started on hybridizing the different species and focused on the Neoregelia and Vriesea species because of their leaf patterns and grew other kinds of bromeliads as he became successful.

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