James Bond (Vriesea splendens)

Maybe it's just me. In fact, probably it's just me. But if ever a plant naturally looked like it was wearing a tuxedo, Vriesea splendens would be that plant as far as I'm concerned.¹ Which is enough of a reason right there to call it James Bond, but I also hear it prefers its fertilizer shaken, not stirred. I really had no choice.


It's a charmer, though it's not exactly what you'd call friendly, from an indoor-growing standpoint. There's remarkably little information about them on-line, which is frustrating, and what information there is tends to be enigmatic, ambiguous stuff like, "this is one of the more difficult bromeliads," without any real details about the nature of the difficulty. It's like, everybody's kind of trying to warn you away from this one, but they won't tell you why exactly. I'm not going to do that, because I haven't had any bad experiences with mine and don't see any reason to discourage anybody. I liked my first one so well that I got a second, even:


But of course this could all fall to pieces come winter. We don't know.²

Since, like I said, there's not much hard information out there about keeping these, the care information I can provide is going to be a little sketchy, and is going to have to rely more on my personal experiences than I like. But oh well:

LIGHT: There's general consensus that some sun, or filtered sun, is desirable. No word on what happens if the plant isn't getting enough, but too much is supposed to bleach out the green parts of the leaves (the dark spots apparently remain dark?). Both of my plants have been in a west window for a long time and seem to be perfectly happy there.

WATERING: I water mine essentially the same way that I water any of the other bromeliads I own: I let it get to the point where I can't feel any moisture in the soil with my finger, and then I soak the hell out of the soil, fill up the vase, and start the cycle over again. This has worked fine for a long time with my Guzmanias and Aechmeas, and worked for the small Vriesea in the pictures here for a year, so I'm assuming this must be okay.


TEMPERATURE: This is one of the care requirements that seems to be an actual problem for people, or at least it's something that people seem to insist on. Consensus is that you're safe between 60-80F (16-27C), and beyond those boundaries you're on your own. My own plants are usually in that range, though we do occasionally have brief periods above and below those temperatures, which haven't caused any visible problems.

HUMIDITY: This is the other factor that people tend to mention, and . . . well, I'm just not sure it's as critical as they say. It's hard for me to know, though, because my indoor humidity levels aren't maybe quite normal.³ Let's suffice it to say that more humidity is better, but that it's not clear how dry is too dry.

PESTS: They don't seem to be attacked by anything in particular, as far as I've been able to find. My own plants have never had anything that I'm aware of, nor any of the plants at work. Rot can be an issue if the soil is kept too wet for too long, though even then, it seems to take a while to kick in. We did lose some offsets to rot at work, which was a damn shame: six offsets, and the only one that made it was the one I took home. It was sad.

PROPAGATION: After flowering, like with most other bromeliads, the original plant dies, though it produces pups on its way out. Exactly how many pups to expect is a weird issue: I ran into a source that said one plant only produces one pup, always, and if you want more than that then you have to use seeds. I know I've seen at least one plant that had two pups on it at once, though, because I nearly bought it, so that's pretty definitely not true. So I don't know.

Pups should be separated when they're fairly large (maybe, say, when they're 75-80% the height of the parent), ideally when they've produced some roots of their own, with a clean knife (or you can just pull them apart, sometimes). Although some bromeliads will continue to offset for a long time, if you take off the pups (My oldest Aechmea fasciata has produced five offsets after two years post-flower, and I have a couple Guzmania lingulatas that have each produced six. In all three cases, the parent plants still seem healthy and functional and are not necessarily finished yet.), I have never tried re-potting a parent Vriesea splendens, so I'm not sure if this would work to produce more pups, but I sure as hell intend to try when my large one starts to offset.


FEEDING: Vrieseas are not, as best as I can tell, particularly heavy feeders, though they are probably pretty regular feeders, like most bromeliads, and they may also be more sensitive to copper than most plants, like some other bromeliads. I feed at a fairly low strength year-round, though probably I could skip winter. (For various reasons, it's easier for me to feed all the time than it would be to keep track of what had been fed and what hadn't and when the last feedings were for everything.) Some sources advise feeding through the leaves, vase, and roots simultaneously; I'm not sure I can see how it would matter, and only feed mine through the roots. Which seems to work fine.

GROOMING: Basically non-existent. Removing dead leaves and dead flowers is about it, and neither of those are things you're going to have to do often.

Aside from that, I can tell you that it has 25 pairs of chromosomes,⁴ which could be worth knowing someday (maybe the next time you're on "Jeopardy?") and that's about it. The flower spikes are supposed to last for several months; I didn't see any hard data on precisely how long, but four and six months are apparently not unheard of. My personal plant has been in bloom for at least two months.

There are at least a couple cultivars of note: my personal plants were sold to us as the cultivar 'Splenreit,' or possibly 'Splenriet' (the spelling on the internet is inconsistent, and I don't know which is correct). Presumably there's something particularly cool about 'Splen-'whatever, but I don't know what it is.⁵ There is also a dwarf variety, which is called 'Mini,' and which is mostly cool just for being smaller and staying smaller; it doesn't appear to have any different care requirements or anything.


As a genus, Vriesea's closest relatives are the Tillandsias, which surprises me a little (they certainly don't look terribly related from the leaves.). One can see a resemblance in some of the flowers, though. (Compare Vriesea splendens with Tillandsia cyanea, for example. Specifically, the flattened arrangement of bracts.)

Finally: I don't think Vriesea splendens is likely to be toxic to children or pets, based on the fact that bromeliads typically aren't, and none of the sites I looked at mentioned anything to that effect. The plant also has no spines or anything that might injure anybody. So if it has a license to kill, it's playing it pretty close to the vest.

UPDATE (22Jan09): See the unfinished business post on this plant for more about the offsetting and relationship to Tillandsia spp.

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Photo credits: All mine except the last one, which is from "Tequila" at Wikipedia.

¹ Okay, maybe Aphelandra squarrosa.
² I do suspect, though, at least: the smaller of my plants made it through last winter just fine. So I would be surprised if winter were a big problem for them this year.
³ As has been previously noted, I have a large number of plants in a small amount of space, and they do all keep the humidity elevated for one another. Still, my cheapo K-Mart thermometer/humidity gauge generally stays around 40-60% at all times: it's good compared to an office building, but it's hardly a greenhouse.
⁴ Humans, of course, only have 23. Vriesea chromosomes are apparently small, as chromosomes go, so it does probably take more DNA to make a human than it does to make a Vriesea. (This is not a foregone conclusion: the genome for onions, for example, is much larger than the human genome. It is not yet clear how much of the DNA in each species actually needs to be there, though.) While I'm here, digressing anyway: the ancestral bromeliad species is thought to have had 25 pairs of genomes as well, because it's the most common number for modern bromeliads, and those species that differ tend to have either very close numbers like 24 or 26, or multiples of 25, like 50 or 100.
⁵ I couldn't find any information about 'Splen'whatever by itself. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it was supposed to be easier to care for than the species, given that I'm having an easier time with it than everybody seems to think I ought to. But I have no actual evidence for that, so I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find out that it's a cultivar for some entirely different reason (bloom longevity, or seed production, or who knows what).