Introduction to Bromileads

Back in 2015, I met a guy called Andreas who’s a keen gardener like me and we quickly became good friends. Shortly after I met him I found out he was planning to shift house and he was doing it all on his own so Marie and I took pity on him and offered to give him a hand, which he greatly appreciated.

We quickly found out just how much he loved his garden when we saw his amazing collection of plants, many of which he was storing in an empty in-ground swimming pool. He had all kinds of palms, cycads, not to mention a huge variety of other rare tropical plants including a huge collection of Bromileads. When he started rattling off all their botanical names we soon realised the depth of his obsession. He’s a collector at heart and he has an impressive ability to retain information about the things he collects.

It turns out he had way too many plants to take with him so out of appreciation for our help he kindly gave us a whole bunch of plants, including a few palms and a number of bromileads. I’d never ventured into the world of Bromileads until then, but I have always liked the effect they create in tropical gardens.

  

One thing I’ve discovered about them is that they multiply over time, occasionally 'throwing pups' as Andreas calls it, before the parent (or host plant) dies off. So in the few short years since he first gave us some, we now have quite a number of them dotted around our property, wherever there’s space.

I recently established a new garden by our front gate and decided that that would be a good place to put some of them. As it happens, all the ones I selected for this garden all love the full sun which is exactly what they get in this particular spot (pictured below). But not all of them like full sun. Some prefer the shade, like the 2 pictured above named “Grace’s Avalanche” & “Dark Knight” — don't ask me to repeat the botannical name he told us as I’ve completely forgotten that. The green one on the right in the pic below will apparently grow to a massive size, so I’ve left a bit of space around it in anticipation.

Some of them have a serrated edge on the leaves and are quite sharp and prickly, others are quite smooth and safe to handle. The one pictured below is my favourite. It has a red tip on the end of each leaf and before the host dies off it sends up an impressive red snake-like flower stem that adds a interesting focal point to this part of the garden.

This particular plant will need attention soon as there are about four host plants in the one pot that are all about to die and each one will have thrown a few pups which will need to be split up and re-potted.

As I’ve discovered, there are so many different kinds of Bromileads each with their own characteristics and habits. I’ll discuss more about bromeliads in another post later including the ones I’ve earmarked for the tropical shade garden next to the sleepout.

Fantail Cottage – Bathroom Facilities DIY

Despite the fact that this is supposed to be a blog that’s all about Gardening, there have been quite a few DIY projects that have been dominating my time lately. But it’s DIY in the garden I've been busy with, so I’m sure my gardening readers will forgive me. Most avid gardeners will know and acknowledge that there is always a need for a certain amount of DIY, whether it’s making up tomato stakes out of a few bits of old decking or building a garden shed... basically, doing whatever’s needed.

Following on from my last post about “Fantail Cottage” and our plans to make it available to paying guests, we realised for it to work properly I had to do something about the bathroom facilities.

I built an emergency bathroom quite a few years ago with toilet and shower that has been barely adequate – a typical gardeners bathroom that has seen many of my muddy boots over the years so not really suitable for paying guests to use. The bathroom is located about 10 metres (up a few steps) from the sleepout as shown in the above picture. The bathroom is through that door on the right. So the plan is to extend it making it bigger and more comfortable to use.

However, nothing is quite as simple as it sounds.

Before I can do anything about enlarging it, there are a couple of quite big jobs to do first. Like getting rid of that big pile of clay (on the left in the above picture). All that clay got piled there years ago when I excavated the basement of the house. There was nowhere else on the property to put it so it just sat there eventually becoming part of the back lawn, so now getting rid of it was going to be a tricky, time consuming and heavy job.

I made a start months ago and using a wheelbarrow took it down the steps, over the bridge past the sleepout and up the other side of the gully to the very back of the property and then disposing it somewhere out of view — a  total of some 50 odd metres up and down steep slopes, and Auckland clay isn't light. I could only do a half dozen trips before I was completely exhausted, so it was going to be a long, slow job doing it that way. Surprisingly, what I’d done in the above pic represents about 30 odd barrows full as it expands considerably when you break it up. The picture above shows how far I got before I realised I had to come up with a better plan.

As it happens, there’s an access ramp I built years ago that enabled me to get up and down into the gully with wheelbarrows and lawnmowers, etc.

I’d built it out of landscaping grade Macrocarpa and it was beginning to rot so it would need replacing at some stage. So I decided to demolish the ramp and build a retaining wall in its place, then I could fill the cavity created with all the clay.

I hasten to point out that this was Marie’s idea and a rather good one as it turns out.

So thankfully the job of shifting the clay became so much easier, and now I’m already starting to sense a feeling of space having now created a large flat area to work with.

There are still a few jobs to do before I can start on the bathroom. I need to rebuild a keystone retaining wall to hold the remaining bank up plus I need to remove those 2 punga ferns next to the bathroom.

The current problem is the weather as it’s been raining for the last week or so and there’s still several days of rain forecast, meaning I can’t do much more until it stops. So it's going to take another month or more yet before anything resembling a new bathroom will start to emerge.

In the mean time, I've been getting a few supplies together including a second hand steel bath (a really nice one) and a bunch of second hand glass bricks. I want one wall of the bathroom to be all glass so as to catch more natural light. The existing bathroom, which is little more than an outhouse currently, is quite dark and gloomy.

Watch this space.