Reginald Deroose
Born on the 22nd of January 1954, in an extremely cold winter, I grew up on a small nursery close to Ghent, in Belgium. In the beginning, my father and my uncle were still growing ferns and anthuriums, but already mainly bromeliads. All the plants were grown from seeds or from cuttings.
As I grew up it became an ‘only bromeliad’ nursery, moving from Nidularium , Aechmea fasciata, Neoregelia towards seed production and cutting production of Vriesea and Guzmania. At the time that I dropped out of the university and started to work with my parents who were doing cutting production of the best selections of their Vrieseas and we were selling seedlings to producers in Holland, Germany and Italy. Because of the energy crisis in the seventies the cost of production went up dramatically, there was no room in the market for green leaved Vrieseas from seed, because of the variability of the seedlings.
I had a cousin,
Antoine Deroose, who was at that time operational manager on the biggest
bromeliad nursery in Italy. He was really interested in Tissue Culture. During
my internship at Fratelli Pecorari he got me triggered and around 1980 I made a
contract with a state research institution in Belgium to learn and to further develop
tissue culture technology for Bromeliads. I was really interested in the
breeding part of the business of my parents. I understood that the only way to
be able to support my breeding work was using tissue culture technology to have
the possibility only to bring the best selections out of a batch of breeding,
to the market.
That was the start
of a wonderful business and the journey of my life.
Topic name:
Breeding and
cloning bromeliads with Reginald and Company