I've finally found a plant gift that kids adore. Not an insect-eating 'pitcher plant' - I've yet to see any of the carnivorous plants catch even a mosquito. Give your kid a tillandsia - or even better, six tillandsias - each weirdly, wonderfully different from the other.
Never heard of tillandsias? I'd show you mine but some rotter pinched my collection. Or possibly several rotters, as the line of weird, fuzzy little plants glued onto rocks along our windowsill gradually shrank during the years we held open gardens. At least one teaspoon also vanished with every busload of visitors.
You've probably seen tillandsias every time you visited a plant nursery, but never noticed them, hiding small and insignificant on the counter. They're also known as air plants, and once you actually look at them, they are wonderfully, fascinatingly bizarre.
Tillandsias need no soil. In the wild they grow on rocks or tree branches. Some species grow in the desert, surviving on moisture that condenses from the night air. Others grow in misty mountains. The desert ones usually have dull, silvery foliage. The rainforest ones are shiny.
Tillandsia are so small they need to be displayed in an uncluttered spot. The windowsill or the edge of your desk by the window is perfect - well lighted, but not enough direct sunlight to burn the foliage.
Given there are up to 700 tillandsia species, they come in a glorious eccentric variety, all with tendrils waving like aliens trying to signal the mother ship. They may be silvery red, yellow, pink, straw coloured, purple or multi-coloured. Most have masses of thin leaves like a bad hairdo. Others have wider and wavy leaves, or ones that point down like a miniature waterfall.
Some tillandsia grow enormous, but the varieties sold in your local nursery or online will be mostly tiny varieties, each one glued onto a decorative rock, or several attached to a piece of driftwood. Like bonsai, tillandsia are cultivated to be living art. Unlike bonsai, which need expert care and may die within a fortnight while you holiday at the coast, tillandsia will survive almost anything except being waterlogged. Glue them on a rock and they'll be right. Even a five-year-old can tend a thriving garden of tillandsia.
My first tillandsia was a gift from a student in Broken Hill, glued onto a piece of Broken Hill rock. It was silly and charming and I loved it, partly because of the thought that came with the gift, and partly because I love rocks, and have picked up interesting pebbles since I was small.
That tillandsia had a tuft of green and grey hair, a bit like a triffid. I put it on the living room windowsill. It looked lonely, so I bought another, and glued it onto an attractive chunk of pink and grey granite with a streak of green. By then I couldn't resist finding a yellow one to glue onto a smooth black egg-shaped rock. It looked like a chicken beginning to hatch.
I was hooked.
Luckily tillandsia are cheap. Most cost about $7, though rare ones are said to reach $70 or even a couple of hundred dollars.
The fun from a tillandsia collection comes from whatever you decide to glue it on. Mine were simply rock-bound. Shell and tillandsia collections can be gorgeous, as if the creatures that once lived inside have come out to visit.
The possibilities are endless. Cover the top of an old football, or glue them onto a T-shirt so you carry around your own oxygen producers. I've seen tillandsias in rows on bathroom windows, like a living curtain, or along a windowsill, and once around the top of a lavatory, where presumably they were watered by the vapour each time it was flushed. I'm not sure about the sanitary implication of a tillandsia lavatory garden.
Fall in love with a striated rock, or clump of white quartz? Glue a tillandsia on it. Find a hunk of driftwood that isn't quite ornamental enough to place by itself on the shelf? Glue on some tillandsia. Grown tired of a long-haired doll? Shave her hair, replace it with twining green tillandsia, and you have an alien. Use a Texta to shade her skin silver and green and you have art. Not necessarily good art, but fun.
It's just occurred to me that perhaps tillandsias are aliens, invading Earth disguised as plants, observing us from the windowsill.
Tillandsias survive with a misting twice a week, or a weekly quick dunk in water. Mine sat on the windowsill where I remembered to dunk them about one week in three, but they flourished nonetheless. They'll grow faster if you feed them, but common fertilisers kill them. Use a quarter-strength air plant or bromeliad fertiliser. One source claims that watering tillandsias with the liquid from a fish tank or pond gives them all the tucker they need. It never occurred to me to feed mine.
Homes with plants feel happier. Indulge yourself with tillandsia next time you go to the nursery. You too can have tentacled aliens on your windowsill, ones that will make you grin.
