How to Grow and Care for Queen’s Tears Bromeliads

How to Grow and Care for Queen’s Tears Bromeliads Billbergia nutans

Tropical flowering queen’s tears is a non-parasitic epiphyte in the Bromeliaceae or bromeliad family.

In the wild, it clings to trees or rocks, doing no harm to its host, and nourishing itself with rain and airborne organic debris.

In gardens in USDA Hardiness Zones 9 to 11, it is a decorative ornamental species. And for those elsewhere, B. nutans is an easy-care houseplant.

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Our guide to growing bromeliads offers a general overview of cultivating various species at home.

This article focuses specifically on growing and caring for queen’s tears.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Let’s meet this blossoming beauty!

Cultivation and History

Queen’s tears is native to the arid climate of eastern coastal Mexico, Central America, most of South America, except for Chile, southern Argentina, and the Windward Islands.

In addition to being a rock- and tree-dwelling epiphyte, it grows on the organically-rich rainforest floor as a ground cover.

Swedish botanist Carl Peter Thunberg, who trained under the famed father of taxonomical classification, Carl Linnaeus, named theBillbergia genus to honor the self-taught Swedish botanist Gustaf Johan Billberg. It contains 62 species.

B. nutanswas recognized and named in 1869 by German botanists Wendland and von Regel. “Nutans” is Latin for nodding and refers to the arching form of the foliage and inflorescences or flower-bearing stems.

There is evidence of the hybridization of queen’s tears dating back to the 1920s.

In 1925, the American naturalist Theodore Luqueer Mead supplied the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with a specimen