A good wall pot plant

Keeping a diary is something I have always been very poor at. A classic gift idea, diaries. I have been given many of them over the years and I've hardly opened or used any of them. I realised, however, some time ago, that this gardening blog of mine is probably my best effort at keeping a diary, and lo and behold I've been doing it for almost 10 years now. 

And so when I checked back on my blog/diary to see when my Vriesia bromeliads last flowered, it will come as no surprise to find out it was also in late April. In fact, a scan down through the years shows they flower like clockwork ... "hmmm, the bromeliads are flowering ... it must be late April".

Here they are settling into their work this sunny April afternoon. Now, I was expecting something weird to happen to their flowering time this year, as the weather here in Sydney sure has been weirdly hot and not remotely like any Autumn that we know of. But as far as these clockwork flowers are concerned, their inbuilt calendar isn't going to be upset by some stupid heatwave. Hell, they're from Central America anyway, and they love heatwaves.

Now, the purpose of this rare update on my blog is simply to let you know that if you have a boring brick wall somewhere, especially one that gets no direct sunlight at all, then these are ideal plants to plant in a wall pot.

They need very little maintenance, apart from the occasional sprinkle with the hose (and not too much, either). My wall pots are completely under cover, under a covered pergola, so they never get rained on. So, I just make sure that every few days when I'm watering the vegies, that I sprinkle my bromeliads as well. As their pots sit right above the spot on the wall where my hose reel is mounted, I never forget to do that job.

The plant label name of this commonly available bromeliad is Bromeliad vriesia, and it sometimes is also labelled as 'Isabel'. Its flowers should last for a few months at least. And when they're not flowering, at least the potted plants offer up a lot of pleasant, green, strappy foliage.

Prior to these bromeliads I had tried some other plants in wall pots and they were either too much work or at least didn't thrive. These guys loved it from Day One.

The best way to kill a bromeliad, if you really enjoy plant murder, is to place it in full sun (you cruel beast), or overwater it (I also suspect the over-waterers also own fat cats and fat dogs, but that's just a theory). 

I plant mine into a 50:50 mix of orchid potting mix and normal potting mix, and that's all they need. I never fertilise them, and I water them very sparingly in winter, but more often in summer.

They do have little water "cups" at their base which some people become obsessed about and constantly fill up, most of the time killing their bromeliads at the same time.

If you're in Australia and reading this blog now, in April or later on in May, these plants might be in flower at your local garden centre. Maybe. Perhaps. If you're lucky. They should be. They're a great plant for apartments and balconies, too.

Hello walls

Until I tried bromeliads I never really had all that much success with wall pots. They're terrible things to grow plants in, as far as I'm concerned, but bromeliads are the kind of unfussy plants which really don't give a toss where they grow, provided it's warm.

And so, today, folks, my wall pots of Vriesia bromeliads are in bloom, as they have been for the last few weeks, and they will be for the next few weeks as well. Here they are.

I had tried other plants in these wall pots, such as impatiens, 
but they were all high maintenance and, in the end, too much
work and not that successful. These broms have been here
more than two years now and hardly need any attention.

There's hardly a boring bromeliad flower
in the pantheon, and this tropical fantasy
of youthful colour doesn't let the team down.

I guess if I was better at growing broms that
I might be able to egg it on to produce more
blooms, as multiple blooms do look good
together, but what I know about bromeliad
growing doesn't take long to share.

The first thing about them to know is that in their native rainforest habitats they don't grow in soil. They live on tree trunks, as ephiphytes, just like orchids. So for gardens, their potting mix should be very coarse and just somewhere for their clingy roots to hang out in. I use the one recommended to me, of a 50:50 mix of orchid potting mix and ordinary potting mix.

I also feed them with slow-release granules formulated for orchids. And I water them every now and then. I've been told that the quickest way to kill a brom is to over-water it, and so I take great delight in being a slacker about watering my broms. Seems to work.

The wall pots themselves are under a covered pergola that faces north, so it's very bright, but all light is filtered and the plants are never directly kissed by sunshine. That also seems to suit them fine. And of course I am in Sydney, which is frost-free through winter. Never gets that cold here. And that's it, that's everything I know about growing broms.

However, my main point with this post is simply to recommend bromeliads for wall pots in shady or semi-shaded spots, such as down the side passage of houses. I cannot for the life of me understand why optimistic desperados try to grow vegetables in wall pots down the sides of their houses. That is such hard work with the odds stacked against you right from the start. If you want some year-round greenery plus interesting flowers as a bonus that lasts a few months, I'd always go for bromeliads for that difficult assignment.

Wall flowers

I think I've found the plant to happily occupy my trio of wall pots. If happiness is a flower, then my Vriesia bromeliads are happy here, as two of the three potted bromeliads, which I only planted here a few months ago as little baby 'pups', are already in flower.

This very handy bromeliad website tells me that my bromeliad is Vriesia 'Isabel', no doubt one of the hardiest and easiest broms to grow, because as a brom beginner it would have to be a tough and easy one for me to grow, as I don't really know all that much about them.

Before I move on to my inevitable blathering on about what precious little I know about broms, let's just give my snazzy new pocket digital camera a spin in macro mode and have a look at this brom bloom, close-up. Does that scream 'tropical' at you, or what?

Now, here's a far less pretty shot of two of the three pots in situ. Terracotta wall pots, bolted to the wall, doing their usual business of leaching salts out of the pores and leaving a white crust, like kids' mouths after eating ice-creams.

This area gets zero direct sunshine, but stacks of filtered sun via the polycarbonate roofing of the pergola overhead, and the shadecloth on the western side. In summer it can get very hot and humid here, but it's sheltered from all cool southerly and westerly winds. It's a spot that suits the tropical/subtropical broms to a tee. Never sunny, never cold, occasionally stinking hot and humid – just like its South American home!

I had tried New Guinea impatiens in these pots, but they were so thirsty that the slightest inattention to watering led to instant wilting, and a wilting plant is just such a pathetic, sad thing to come across regularly that I pulled them out in disgust. Then the pots lay empty for part of the summer, as I pondered what to plant there. It was only when I decided to repot my bromeliads, and had too many 'pups' (baby broms) and not enough pots on hand to put them in, that I (thick as a brick) finally thought of the wall pots.

It turns out that I should have had them in wall pots all along. In the wild broms don't grow in soil. They mostly cling onto tree branches or, sometimes, rocks. And so the small amount of soil in a narrow wall pot isn't a problem for them at all. The potting mix I use is the one our magazine suggests: 50:50 orchid bark and ordinary potting mix. Seems to work OK!

As for care, they're dead easy. They do like to have some water in their little central 'cup', but it doesn't have to be constantly full or topped up. During our cooler temperate winters they like to be kept on the dry side, and during summer they like things on the moist and humid side. I sprinkle some slow-release fertiliser around them, and that's it. I guess I'm watering them about twice a week now, in autumn, and it'll be down to once a week in winter. Overwatering in winter is a really good way to kill them (a bit like indoor tropical plants, come to think of it.)

As I mentioned earlier, these wall-potted plants were planted as 'pups', new plants which spring up from the sides of the parent, from the base of the plant. I waited until the pups were about one-third the size of the parent plant, then cut them off with a knife, trying to take some roots with each pup.

After sending up its litter of pups the parent plant dies off (I'm not sure if that bit is true to all broms or not, but it's true for the few broms I have, Vriesias and Neoregelias.) And so an occasional routine around here is unpotting, dividing up, and repotting the pups (but if you don't get around to this, it doesn't matter, the pot will just be chockers with pups growing into adults).

Each time I do my repotting the number of plants has steadily grown. Hardly any die, so the way I keep the numbers of potted plants down is simply to give some away. So if you see a bromeliad and are tempted, or someone who already owns some offers you a freebie, take it.

Find a sheltered spot away from too much direct sun, such as a wall under a balcony or pergola, install some wall pots, and give amazing tropical bromeliads a go. There's only a zillion to choose from, so you'll probably find a couple of dozen that you'll adore.

The obvious solution

So, what's wrong in this photo? That's right, the right-hand pot is empty. The obvious solution is to plant something there. Now, I'm not much of a garden designer, but my hunch is another white-flowered plant would probably do the trick. It's the obvious solution. But what have I done the last couple of weeks? Jotted down in my mental 'to do' list the item "get another white-flowered impatiens for the wall pot". And what occurred to me last weekend? That's right, strike a cutting from the other plants, you idiot!

There once was a white-flowered impatiens in the right-hand pot, but it suffered from a disease which I can only describe as 'wilty guts'. It received the same food and water as its mates on the left and it just wilted its heart out and died in mid-November. And so I removed the plant, the potting mix and scrubbed out the pot. And then last weekend it finally dawned on me to take a cutting of the New Guinea impatiens (the one on the left). Being a tropical plant it should love the weather right now. The one in the middle is a 'normal' impatiens, ie, it's not from the tropics.

Roots started to form on the New Guinea impatiens cutting within days in this jar of water. This is it on Wednesday this week.

And this is it on Friday, today. Ready, willing and able – and growing like crazy. As well as the roots in the middle of the pot, if you look carefully there's another clutch of them at the bottom of the jar as well.

With a willingness to grow like that, I decided that the longer I delayed potting it up the longer I'd have to wait for flowers. So into some fresh potting mix in the late afternoon, watered in with some seaweed solution to help it settle in and hopefully it will starting leaping ahead rapidly.

Hopefully, by about the end of January it should be looking the part, just like its neighbours. I'll give it a quarter-strength liquid feed weekly, and hopefully I'll be able to trick it into thinking that it's back in the New Guinea highlands, where everything grows like crazy and the nutrients trickle down daily.

This is the role model for the young 'un – Uncle Moresby, the New Guinean organ donor who kindly provided the vigorous cutting that will grow up to become his nephew, Lae. Hopefully the new plant will be a chip off the old block.

Really, though. It should have occurred to me the moment old Wilty Guts carked it to take some cuttings and replace him quick smart. It was the obvious solution!