THE MOSS-LIKE TILLANDSIA. 



{Tillandsia usneoides, Linn.) 



By Robert Turner. 



(Specimens of the Plant and Photographs of Trees showing its mode 

 of growth exhibited ijth March, 1890.) 



This plant is found abundantly in the Southern United States 

 from Virginia to Florida, also in the West Indies and Brazil. It 

 hangs in dark and tangled masses from oak and pine branches, 

 and is known popularly in the States as long moss, black moss, or 

 old man's beard. 



It is an epiphytic plant, growing on trees but not deriving 

 any of its sustenance from them. Most of these epiphytes are 

 showy plants, but this one is not. They chiefly belong to the 

 orders Orchidacece and Bromeliacea, and Tillandsia is included in 

 the latter. 



Tillandsia usneoides is externally very unlike the others of the 

 same genus. Its stem is diffuse, filiform, pendulous, and branch- 

 ing. Now Tillandsia utriculata — the wild pineapple of Jamaica 

 — has a stem three or four feet high and leaves a yard long, and 

 these leaves are placed within each other in such a way that the 

 water which runs down them is retained in their expanded bases, 

 which swell out and form a reservoir or bottle, often holding nearly 

 a quart of water, and as this is contracted at the neck evaporation 

 is prevented. In the dry season they are the resort of animals 

 and even a resource of travellers when other supplies fail. Some 

 thirty species have been enumerated, all natives of the New 

 World, though some have been introduced to West Africa and the 

 East Indies. Most of them have leaves that serve as reservoirs 

 for water, and they can all exist in a hot dry air without contact 

 with the earth. 



