The Collaborative International Dictionary
Air plant \Air" plant`\ (Bot.) A plant deriving its sustenance from the air alone; an a["e]rophyte.
Note: The ``Florida moss'' ( Tillandsia, many tropical orchids, and most mosses and lichens are air plants. Those which are lodged upon trees, but not parasitic on them, such as the Spanish moss Tillandsia usneoides), are epiphytes.
Wiktionary
n. (plural of epiphyte English)
Usage examples of "epiphytes".
It would be caught and trapped along the way by expansive bromeliads, enterprising epiphytes, aerial roots, and thirsty fauna.
Fully awake, he took in the enveloping hylaea, the glistening arboreals, the brilliant-hued flowers, the vines and lianas and epiphytes and symbiotes.
It lay amidst a cluster of epiphytes bright with tiny white flowers whose petals had closed for the night.
As a third figure came ambling out of the dense vegetation that lay in the direction of the trunk, the motionless form abed in the black-flowering epiphytes rolled to its feet.
Fully awake, he took in the envelopÂing hylaea, the glistening arboreals, the brilliant hued flowers, the vines and lianas and epiphytes and symÂbiotes.
As a third figure came ambling out of the dense vegetation that lay in the direction of the trunk, the motionless form abed in the black flowering epiphytes rolled to its feet.
Even before the frantic Sailings of legs and tentacles ceased, the first row had been shoved aside and tumbled and bounced off branches and epiphytes into the depths below.
Thousands of Yuuzhan Vong of unknown caste clambered up and down and across these walls, festooning them with brilliantly colored epiphytes and flowering vines, hanging living cages and nests occupied by a bewildering variety of creatures so alien Ganner couldn't even really see them clearly: his eyes kept trying to interpret them as insects or reptiles, rodents or felines or some other type of animal with which he was already familiar, when these were really nothing like anything he'd ever seen before.
I'm merely pointing out that they are all interconnected, both by the root-node linkage and by your green epiphytes in the branches.
He remembered the fantastic profusion of plant life, everything sprouting and uncoiling almost while one watched, and yet somehow oddly disciplined, everything fitting into well-defined layers - the towering slender trees bare of branches for seven eighths of their height, then flaring out into great umbrellas of leaves tied together into a tight canopy by a tangle of vines and creepers and epiphytes, and under that a level of shorter, rounder, fuller, more shade-tolerant trees, and a stratum of clumping shrubbery below that, and then the forest floor, dark, mysterious, all but barren, a stark expanse of damp thin spongy soil that bounced jauntily underfoot.
Genetic indoor grass carpeted the floor, complete with a flourish of flowering weeds, while descented epiphytes grew from watering holes in the ceiling.
Mosses and epiphytes rooted on the bark blazed in red horror, scattering carbonized leaves and tiny animals killed with painless abruptness.