Years ago when many botanists made collecting trips to Peru they'd encounter (around Xmas time) huge piles of tectorum strewn about villages to be used as snow to decorate their rooftops in their holiday decorations. Afterwards the plants would be unceremoniously dumped on the edge of town to die. The name tectorum actually means something like "roof plant".
Family: Bromeliad
Sub-Family: Tillandsioideae
Genus: Tillandsia
Sub-Genus:
Native distribution: There are many different forms of T.tectorum and their habitat is high up in Peru, way high!
Habit: This form of tectorum has a pronounced stem stem that is created as the plant grows.
Foliage: The leaves of all t, tectorums are covered with highly visible silver trichomes. The reason for their heavy "armor" of trichomes is to deflect the intense UV rays of high altitudes.
Flowers:
Seed:
Pups:
Cultivation: Tectorums get by with just the barest of moisture in nature. The reason they are so heavily scaled (white trichomes) is because they grow at such a high and dry altitudes. This covering protects against extreme ultra-violet light (we're talking HIGH up!) and picks up what little condensation from fog they can. For this reason they can go weeks, months, without a good dose of water.
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: A highly sort after plant not readily avaiulable
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