Fantastic! Thank you guys....close to a Monstera then, but their labelling could have been somewhat better! I shall try very hard to keep up the good work (although I suspect the plant's success is more down to the plant itself than to anything I'm doing!! - maybe it just likes my windowsill.....) Thanks again - I'm off to read up on it now :-)

I knew a member of an "Old Italian family" (if you get my drift) whose forebears were instrumental in the running of the Balinese back in the "bad old days" when they had illegal bootleg liqour and slot machines and fancy ladies in there. When I dated him in the 80's, his family still had the slot machines that were taken out of there when the law descended on the place and shut it down. There was a fairly well known story that there was a big circular trapdoor in the kitchen of the Balinese, the cook used to sit in there in slow times and fish, and whatever he caught was cooked up as the fresh catch of teh day, but the door also had another use: when the law was on the way, all the illegal hootch and weapons went out of it into the ocean. They said it was possible to see the cops coming from the moment they stepped onto the boardwalk, and it took them so long to get out to the actual club that by the time they did, everything had been "sanitized". Interesting family. Interesting history. When I lived in Rockport, I can never remember any freezes. If they happened it was after we moved away in the late 70's. I have no family left there (or anywhere, for that matter, I am an orphan now) but my parents are both interred in the Rockport Fulton Cemetery. I grew some stuff as a kid there...my sister and I planted an agave and cactus garden, and we had a bottlebrush tree, and I planted polebeans. After my mom died in 1972 we planted all the potted funerary offerings in the front flowerbed. My dad let me piddle in the flowerbeds but we were pretty poor and there wasn;t a lot of $$ for spending on flowers. Some of my neighbors had really nice stuff though. I see that Houston is getting ICE! HD, is Galveston freezing as well??? I hope all your lovely things are okay! Bust out covers if you have to. It is so weird, it looks from the national weather map today that Florida and Hawaii are the only states that are not going to freeze (if they aren't or haven't already frozen). We have no prediction of even any 30's so far, but I am so feeling bad for everyone who has been hit by the weather system. No gloating here guys. Its just grace of god so to speak. We have usually already had some 20's by now here in Gainesville, its really weird that we have not.

Opinions differ on when to remove the pups (offsets) if at all. If you can stand it, just leave them on til the mother plant is well and truly dead, removing brown dead leaves along the way then copmpletely remove the dead foliage. People who can't stand it, or growers who are trying to get several plants off of one mother before decline, will remove the offsets when they are about 1/3 the size of a mature plant...sometimes removal spurs the mother to produce even more offsets. But, depending on species, your plant may not work this way. Neoregelias will hang around for a long long time and decline more slowly, allowing many offsets to be removed sometimes, while I have found Billgergias tend to crump a little faster. Unless you just don;t like the pot your plant is in, you can leave it there. Many species of bromeliads can be pretty much 100% epiphytic, in the rainforest they grow in the canopy layer attached to trees, rocks, etc. Its actually pretty dry up in the canopy, which is why they have evolved as epiphytes, developing the specialized cells in the water holding tank/cup that allow them to be watered that way. But they can and still do take water and nutrients through the root systems. For many plants, the only reason they have roots is to anchor them to something or into the ground.

I think most mums that they sell around here are hardy. They have been forced to bloom early to be in the store. When I've planted them, the blooms turn brown and I shear them off. If they are hardy, they will stay green all summer and come back next year and bloom.