Mexico Plants

Tillandsia Recurvata

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Plate 266b Plate 266c

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Tillandsia Recurvata: Air plant, Bromelaid, Ball moss.

Ball moss is not a moss. It is a true flowering plant, related to pineapple, Spanish moss, and other bromeliads. Ball moss is not a parasite. It does not take nutrients or water from its host, and it causes no harm to its host. It gets water from the atmosphere and rain and nutrients from the atmosphere and dust. Ball moss is a nitrogen fixer. That is, it is able to convert atmospheric nitrogen (which is unusable to plants) into a form that plants can use. Most plants, with the exception of the legumes, cannot do this. When ball moss falls to the ground, it actually fertilizes the soil for other plants.

Ball moss is the only epiphyte that regularly lives on telephone wires. Clumps of Spanish moss sometimes land on wires, but they don't survive. Look for ball moss on wires in humid places such as alongside a bridge over a creek or wetland.

Most cultivated bromeliads are epiphytic and thus have a natural association with trees. During and after rains, water dripping from trees is no longer just rainwater, but is enriched with minerals leached from tree leaves: bromeliads absorb it through trichomes on their leaf surfaces or through trichomes on the leaf surfaces forming their tanks. The tanks also trap pollen, dead leaves, and twigs and seeds falling from the trees; these materials break down in the tanks to form a nutritive soup available to the bromeliads and mosquito larvae.