Dylan Zoller
Growing up in coastal Southern California, a horticultural paradise for exotic plants, I had become exposed to many groups of striking plants- palms, cycads, cacti & succulents, broms etc.- at a fairly young age. After developing some sub-feverish level of interest I quickly built up a small collection of cacti, succulents, and miscellaneous tropicals after my family had taken me around to almost all local nurseries.
My horticultural tendencies changed around the age of eight when I was given my father’s old copies of Exotica- a pictorial encyclopedia of cultivated tropical plants. Within one of the volumes I found a few pages of black and white images of bromeliad species. This had been my first experience with the diversity of the incredible group, and of course from there I became incredibly fixated on their diversity of form.
About a decade later I finally joined my local society- Saddleback Bromeliad Society- and shortly after, the BSI. Of course this introduced me to a tremendous amount of literature and resources. Shortly after, at the age of 18, I took a job at Sherman Library & Gardens and focused most of my time on horticulture. All factors by this point were pushing me to a full blown bromeliad addiction.
Currently I work full time to maintain the Succulent and Bromeliad gardens and their associated off display collections at Sherman and am pursuing a biology degree. The collections maintained at the garden focus primarily on xeric species for outdoor display and on cloud forest mesic species in covered or sheltered spaces.
In the past few years I have been most interested in seeing bromeliads in habitat and have made two excursions to Colombia, one to Ecuador, a shorter trip within Brazil’s central range, and two multi-month trips across Eastern Brazil in search of localized and obscure Bromeliads.