#ahhh man im kind of foggy today but i hope this is coherent

[botanyshitposts]

You seem like the kind of person who would have strong opinions and/or interesting facts about air plants to share. also please explain them to me because no dirt?? how tho??

ohh man...love those little lads. to be completely honest i’m neutral on them as houseplants, but their biology is kind of hardcore. 

the ‘air plant’ genus (as in the air plants sold in stores and stuff) is called Tillandsia. they’re native to central and south america. i love the first hand account of them in Carlos Magdalena’s The Plant Messiah --which is a really good book and one i recommend to anybody wanting to read something both plant science specific and accessible to non-academics-- and i always end up thinking about it when i see them anywhere day to day, because it’s a really vivid and kind of haunting description of how these plants live in the wild. it’s kind of a longer quote (pages 169-170), but it’s crazy to think about knowing how they’re most well known in north america as houseplants of all things: 

“The National Reserve of San Fernando, about half an hour’s drive from Nazca, is devoted to the rich wildlife areas of the sea and the fog-dependent vegetation by the coastal hills. It is one of the best national parks in Peru for biodiversity, boasting 90 species of desert plants, 90 species of fish and crustaceans, 252 species of birds and a host of animals and reptiles. The Humbolt Current flowing along the coast is relatively cold, like the sea in an early summer at Brighton beach, and cools the air above it. This spreads over the hot land at night, and when the hot and cold air collide, fog or mist forms, which waters the plants. 

I and the rest of the team, including Oliver Whaley and William Milliken from Kew, left the main road at night, and and arrived in the vast desert that runs between Nazca and the coast as the sun rose. There was hardly anything alive. Our shadows were many metres long and projected themselves endlessly over the dunes as we drove. 

There is nothing along this strip of the coast for about 300 or 400 kilometres, and in some areas it is not thought to have rained for thousands of years. Our plan was to cross the desert through the centre, reach the coast, then drive from north to south before returning to Nazca. We started at 4 a.m. to avoid the midday heat of the desert, and only got to bed at around 1 a.m. the next day. With no stop for sleep, we drove for over twenty hours straight. 

The red desert, with its weathered stones and sand, was how I imagine Mars. It felt like we were driving over ground that had never been disturbed before, but after a while, we found some tyre tracks and decided to follow them to avoid further damage to the desert. All around us there was nothing. 

We drove up a mound twenty metres tall to survey the landscape; in the distance we could see ripples in the sand. As we came closer the ripples became lines of Tillandsias, known as clavel del aire (air carnation) or clavelinos (little carnations) in South America. They can survive in the harshest conditions imaginable, where even cacti do not grow. All the lines faced the same way. The wind blows through the Tillandsias and the angle of the leaves makes ripples in the same; as the ripples increase in size, the Tillandsias grow to compensate. The bodies of some Tillandsias have been found to extend three or four metres down into the sand. Thanks to the results of carbon dating, they are believed to be growing from a seed that germinated 14,000 years ago, making them older than ‘Methuselah’ -- a Californian bristlecone pine that is nearly 4,900 years old. 

When we looked closely we could see the condensation on the Tillandsia leaves; behind each plant, in the shadow, the ground was wet where the water had dripped from the leaves [...] Even though it was almost impossibly dry, it was still able to bloom, all because of the fog.”

so, to contextualize this a bit, yes, air plants are usually epiphytes that grow on the branches of cacti and in trees and on telephone wires and pretty much on/around whatever they can latch onto, but the native population Magdalena is describing here literally lives on the dunes and holds the formations together. this is a photo from the San Fernando website: 

wild. like. could you imagine being an air plant sitting in one of those instagram hanging globe things in an earl may in the american midwest and meanwhile other members of your species are thousands of years old and are physically holding a remote expanse of desert together

anyway. magdalena describes how these plants get their water by absorbing it from fog that rolls inland, but he doesn’t describe the mechanisms they use to do that. the leaves of these plants are covered in tons of delicate microscopic scales; they can develop on the roots, too, and their structure helps water condense more efficiently from the fog, which in turn facilitates Slurping Activities. this is a picture of a leaf tip from one i took on a microscope in plant anatomy last semester: 

honestly one of the coolest pics i got from that class. look at this. they’re such intricate structures when you look at them this closely, and yet you have these same plants living on a landscape so remote that it takes 20 hours on a dune buggy to get out there, so desolate that a Kew gardens botanical horticulturist compares their habitat to mars. they live in tons of different environments, of course --when your range is like, from texas to argentina, you gotta have some wiggle room to make shit work-- but it’s just cool. like. i know people love them firsthand for their lives in captivity and their aesthetic value, but you gotta admire that kind of resilience in the wild.