The Shrub Queen: Frogs and Hallelujah
I know, your reaction was probably the same as mine. “Good Lord, what is that?” Purple and white spotted foliage with a red, white and blue flower – who on earth could have dreamed that up? As it turns out a guy named Don Beadle did, a famous breeder of bromeliads he created this one – the Hallelujah Billbergia. Here is a closer view of the flower:
I bought the Billbergia a couple of years ago at a gardening show in Vero Beach, Florida. It was selected to add a tall purple accent in a terracotta wok container of bromeliads I was putting together for my front porch. I did not realize it would flower at all.
funky flower
I walked out on my porch a couple of mornings ago and thought someone had stuck something in the back of the wok planter. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was a flower, a very funky flower. So I gave it a couple of days to see what it would do and decided to cut it for my Monday vase.
I cut it, brought it into the house and had this feeling something was looking at me. I looked down into the foliage and there was a tiny frog in the foliage surrounding the flower. The frog needed to go back outside, I took the whole thing back onto the front porch and the frog happily jumped over the wall and joined a friend in the Heliconias.
Now there were two frogs looking at me. Hopefully, they are having some grand frog fun eating bugs in the garden. Bad bugs only, of course.
The vase in an old silver-plated something my mother bought in (her words) the junk store. I love the patina and I think it was a goblet, but at my house, it has only been used as a vase. Given the brilliant coloration of the centerpiece Hallelujah Billbergia Bromeliad adding a little green and white seemed the best option. Asian Sword Ferns and Asparagus Ferns are the greens and the white flowers at the base are Sweet Begonias (Begonia odorata “Alba”)
Hallelujah!
Amelia Grant
A native of Atlanta, Georgia and extraordinarily well seasoned Landscape Architect/Designer/Writer. I began bouncing around South Florida in the late 1980’s selecting and buying plants for Shopping Mall Interiors I had designed.
Eventually my college roommate landed in Hobe Sound and I came to visit and fell in love with the Treasure Coast. My husband was on the verge of retiring from the practice of Architecture so we came down, bought a house near the Indian River and left the big city’s cold and the traffic far behind.
The blog began as an effort to fill what I considered a vacuum in good gardening information for the Treasure Coast. The Shrub Queen name is a nod to a long standing joke, my husband has called me this for years after one too many Architects asked me to “shrub something up”.
