Fascicularia bicolour - a weird name for a weird plant

Have you ever heard of it?

No, nor had I until my colleague Gareth gave me a crowded potful, several years ago: then a couple of months later, I found an enormous one growing in a Garden, which I had gone to visit.

It's a Bromeliad,  which are strange and exotic evergreen plants, most of which are houseplants: but a few of them are hardy enough to survive outdoors. This one, which comes from Chile, is one of the outdoor ones, and they don't seem to mind our climate at all.

They are evergreen, and very tough: the leaves are not exactly "sharp" but are certainly quite unpleasant to handle. Most of the time, they are just a mound of rigid, dark green foliage: but once they reach a certain size, they start doing something quite extraordinary - the inner leaves turn absolutely bright red!

This is the sort of photo which you find on "plants for sale" sites - and it explains the "bicolour" part of the name, as it is a startling contrast of scarlet and bright blue, with added yellow flecks.

But what are they like, in real life?

Well, Gareth's original gift was split and repotted many times, as they are prolific at producing "pups" around the base, which can be easily removed and potted on, to create new plants. 

This is no longer a "rare" plant in South Oxfordshire, I can assure you!

I had so many of them, that I ended up adding some to a little patch of Guerrilla Garden which my neighbour and I created on the piece of scrubby grass in front of our two houses. Partly just to give them a chance to grow, partly because I had too many of them, and partly to give a shock to the vast numbers of dogs whose owner allow them to pee all over the place...heh heh... but mostly because I didn't have the space in my own small garden, to let them grow on.

Fast forward a few years, and yesterday I was cutting back and weeding our little Guerrilla Garden, and lo! and behold, what did I find?

Yes! One of my Fascicularia plants is actually flowering!!

It's about a yard across now, and although the centre hasn't gone blue - yet -  we do have the bright red inner leaves, which are quite startling to see.

This plant has had no nurturing at all - I planted it, and pretty much forgot about it, and up until yesterday, it had been rather smothered by all the other plant there - so much for "requires full sun", as all the books say!

So there you have it, a weird and wonderful plant, which grows perfectly happily in a west-facing bed, in the cold and windy corner in front of my house.

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