For Competitors and Judges
by Rob Smythe MSc
rsmythe@austarnet.com.au

Well, I am neither of the above so you may well ask what am I doing writing about this topic. How often do successful researchers set about a task and come up with something of interest which is quite peripheral to where they were heading? That is my reason for this note. In my professional career I found research dull and loved teaching. I felt since I only had one life I was not going up blind alleys for most of it (research). Now I am retired there are no shackles and playing at research is much more fun.

An interest for some time has been a neo known as Neo. Corcia x Cruenta 1. This is around under many other names and as Derek Butcher will point out in another paper 2. This probably means that the name on your plant is incorrect. If you have plants with any of the following names you need to concern yourself as to its correctness,
Neo. Corcia x Cruenta, Neo. ‘Sun King’, Neo. cruenta ‘Sun King’, Neo. ‘Yellow Devil’. Neo. ‘Lucky Strike’, Neo.’ Bonanza’, Neo. ‘Eureka’, Neo. Golden Nugget, Neo.  cruenta x coreacae, Neo. ‘Sun King’ x  kautskyi or Neo. ‘Gold Dust’ .

After my years of discussion with growers and Derek Butcher, Derek seems to have come up with a reason for the confusion2. I was left with my plant actually being either Neo. ‘Yellow Devil’ or Neo. ‘Lucky Strike’. Derek is as pig headed as I am about taxonomy. To convince him I had to do something more scientific( a little research) than the usual. I think I have convinced him that my plant, imported by a NSW grower is actually Neo. ‘Yellow Devil’.

Now something interesting happened. As a result of collecting data to convince Derek I found that:
1. In the tropics neos grow with both a clockwise whorl or an anti-clockwise whorl.
2. The plants can have one type of whorl then change to the other type.
3. Plants on the northern side of my house had predominantly anticlockwise whorls.
4. Plants on the southern side had clockwise whorls.
5. The number of leaves to a whorl is of interest also, details later.

These observations were taken both with plants from the one batch of seedlings (Neo. ‘Roy’s Rogue’ x self), split between the two yards and other plants in general.

What do I mean by ‘whorl’ you may well ask? When you stand over your bromeliad and look down at it you will notice that the plant is growing upwards either in a clockwise manner or an anti clockwise manner. How did I come to check on such a weird statistic? Preparing my case to convince Derek of course. I compiled the data originally from my photos and those found on the internet. Yes, the whorls of the northern hemisphere plants went a different way to mine. I lived in the UK and in the USA and forgot to check if water really did rotate in the opposite direction to the southern hemisphere when it went down the plug hole, though on a bigger scale, realistically, I remembered that cyclones and hurricanes spin in opposite directions due to earth’s rotation.

This bit of trivia came to mind so I thought I would check it out with broms and beggared some of my argument in doing so. Realize at this point that I live in Townsville which is in the tropics so sometime the sun moves across the sky to the south like what occurs in the northern hemisphere. Don’t feel put out, I have known parochial Brisbane folk who did not know where Townsville was and I also lived in America and found out that some even believed India was on the American continent somewhere. I found two pups one advanced and one younger on the same plant but having reversed whorls so it is not a useful taxonomical feature. Thinking about this topic I looked deeper and found lower leaves with the whorl reversed.

My conclusion is that the whorl direction is a result of the sun (or light) traversing to the North or to the South of the plant. This may be due to which hemisphere you are in or which side your shade comes from. I am saying that half the broms inner leaves are in more shade than the other (except at times in the tropics ) and the exposed side is dictating whorl growth, following the suns direction of movement. Something like the sunflower but much slower and not reversing.
So What?

After knowing all that it might be considered as important as knowing the sex life of a garden worm in detail. As I don’t believe in competitive growing (causes division) my interest was about that proposed for the worm. What if you do competition growing?

What is the first rule you are told?
“ Keep rotating the plant”
This now reasons as good advice as this won’t change the whorl character.
To keep leaves of balanced length you may be considering either putting plants into more shaded areas or moving them out into more sun. Now you growers living in more southern areas may, using vertical shading, artificially create what in effect is sun from the south and the whorl will change upsetting the conformation of your plant and it will be distorted. Judges will say, “Tut tut— sorry”.

I’ll explain what appears to happen. This is from my inspection of my own tropical plants. Looking down at your broms and looking back from your youngest leaf the second youngest is usually just less than a third of the way round. By the time you come round to where the first leaf is pointing you are nearly exactly half way between third and fourth leaf and so new leaf nicely fills the gap. Looking at my plants that changed whorls, or about to change, the second leaf is way around the other side (180 degrees) then whorls back in the other direction. Judges might note this irregularity as bad conformation. So rule two should be
“don’t change the orientation of the light if you move your plant”

If you grow broms in the ground and not near shade and you live in the south let me know if yours are all the same whorl type.

Visitors from the south always comment that our plants in the tropics are bigger plants with more leaves but there is always an appended comment that our plants down south have one of the following, a much tidier, nicer, regular or more compact growth. Feel sorry for these folk now as they will now have to endure the details of whorls in my long winded answer.
Breeding:

I was also interested in calculating the number of leaves to a whorl in each of my very young seedlings. This way I thought I could predict that those with the larger numerical value would have the densest rosette. It has limited usefulness in the tropics due to whorl variability but I made the following observations which may be of more use to serious breeders living outside of the tropics.
1) The most common whorl size is around three and a half leaves.
2) Plants with whorls of three and a half, as defined above, were very open plants having five stacks of leaves with gaps between the stacks eg Neo. ‘Solar Flare’. These will never win a competition.
3) Neoregelias with a whorl of three or four would also have stacks of leaves and would never win anything as they would have holes you could drive buses through with just two or three stacks of leaves. These would be very inefficient absorbers of radiation and so I can say that I have never seen these configurations with neoregelias though I have seen a couple of species with a whorl of three eg Quesnalia marmorata. These are plants with a few tubular long leaves. Second leaf is 180 degrees on and the third leaf is back with the first leaf.
4) The better reliable show plants (e.g. N. Roy’s Special) have whorls greater than three and a half and less than four, resulting in no close leaf stacking at all.
5) I don’t have any of those cork screw type plants so I don’t know what is going on there. I expect the whorl number is not three and a half, but very close to it.
6) If I was looking at seedlings for future show purposes I think I would be looking for whorls around the three and three quarter mark. If I found more than one I would then concentrate on the one with the widest leaf.

REFERENCES:
1. Shane Zaghini Bromeliads: A guide to the Beautiful Neoregelias p6
2. Derek Butcher - Bromeliaceae - 2005