Family: Bromeliad
Sub-Family: Tillandsioideae
Genus: Tillandsia
Sub-Genus:
Native distribution: T. straminea grows as an epiphyte in Ecuador, Peru.
Habit: T. straminea has thin stirringly, streamer like leaves and can become enormous up to 90 cm across.
Foliage: The soft streamer like leaves are soft and brittle they can sometimes bend or break in wild weather. Most often the leaf develops a bend about half way rather than an elegant curve than many other Tillandsias produce.
Flowers: T. straminea produces a branched inflorescence on a long thin curved stem. The bracts and petals are whitish to purplish in color, the flowers are large and white with a rim of differing shades. The flowers are wonderfully scented with a delicate perfume like a Cattleya orchid and the plant produces many of them over many weeks. The plant retains colour in the bracts for months after flowering.
Seed:
Pups: The plant produces 2 -3 pups at the base of the mother plant which first show as thick pointed lumps.
Cultivation: This plant responds to grown in good, bright conditions but it is somewhat more susceptible to cold and to rot from hot, humid conditions when it doesn’t have a chance to dry out sufficiently. Allow good ventilation.
Fertilization: A mist every week with Epiphyites Delight or Epsom salts during the growing season will help the plant.
( Epiphyte’s Delight fertilizer was developed for a special reason. Nitrogen promotes foliar growth. If you have Tillandsias, Orchids, or other epiphytes and you feed them, take a look at the nitrogen content. If it’s high in urea, the plants can’t use it because the urea needs a bacteria in soil to break it down into ammonia and nitrates. Since the epiphytes don’t have any soil they can’t break down the urea. It was for this reason that we had Epiphyte’s Delight formulated. It contains only ammoniacal and nitrate nitrogen which is immediately accessible and usable by the plants.)
Availability:
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