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What's an epiphyte?

Making It Grow Radio Minute
Provided
/
SC Public Radio
Making It Grow, with host Amanda McNulty

Hello, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Epiphytes are photosynthetic plants that live in trees and don’t have true roots. They get moisture from rain and some necessary nutrients from decaying matter around them in crotches of trees or even from dust and tiny particles of soil in the wind. Being up in trees gives them more access to the sunlight they need for photosynthesis than on the dark, shaded forest floor of tropical rainforests, where the greatest concentration of epiphytes occur. They can do their host plants a service by creating a more humid environment in the tree’s canopy reducing that host plant’s need for cooling transpiration. Most epiphytes, about 90 percent, are flowering plants, followed by about 10 percent which are ferns. I was surprised to read that one third of all ferns are epiphytes.

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Amanda McNulty is a Clemson University Extension Horticulture agent and the host of South Carolina ETV’s Making It Grow! gardening program. She studied horticulture at Clemson University as a non-traditional student. “I’m so fortunate that my early attempts at getting a degree got side tracked as I’m a lot better at getting dirty in the garden than practicing diplomacy!” McNulty also studied at South Carolina State University and earned a graduate degree in teaching there.