How to grow a rainbow: The vibrant bromeliads of Living Colors Nursery

In 1986, Patty Robertson was a buyer for one of Miami-Dade County’s premier garden centers. It was one stop on a lifelong horticultural journey. As a little girl, she’d fallen in love with gardening by watching her mother grow roses.

That love parlayed into a degree in landscape technology and design from Broward Community College (which has since dropped “Community”).

There was no questioning the knowledge and thought she placed into her purchasing decisions for the Florida garden center. Every day, vendors would pull up with trucks full of plants, and she would peruse their options and pick what she needed.

Little did she know that one of the most crucial picks she’d ever make would also arrive at her garden center in a truck.

But it wouldn’t be a plant.

It would be Mitch Rabin.

Love grows in the garden center

Mitch, like Patty, grew up in South Florida. He had always been fascinated by the bromeliad varieties that added bright colors and unique structure to the local gardens. He’d also watched his grandmother and mother collect and propagate African violets, to the extent that nearly every windowsill contained a plant or cuttings.

But a trip to Costa Rica in 1973 cemented his love for bromeliads after seeing them growing in their natural habitat as a crucial part of the forest ecosystem.

His love for tropicals led him to start his own business creating dish gardens and pairing plants with fanciful fairy garden-like additions to create whimsical, contained micro-landscapes. He sold these to garden centers, which eventually led him to pull up to Patty’s store in his 1970 Chevy with the backseat removed so he could deliver his wares.

According to Patty, Mitch was memorable, or at least his dog was. “He came with a floppy-eared Doberman in the front seat. He would travel with her all the time,” she recalls.

“She was a tough and demanding customer. I remember that,” Mitch says of Patty.

During one of his trips to her store, Mitch suggested Patty join him in his new hobby of flying glider planes. That flight never happened, but they did go out for sushi. Eventually, the pair began dating and, with some prodding from Patty, moved in together. But Mitch was hoping for another kind of partnership.

“He asked me to go to work with him at his first company, where they grew bromeliads,” she says. “I said, ‘No, you have to marry me first.’ So, over the last 38 years, there’s been a few ultimatums in our marriage, but it’s worked out pretty good, I think.”

Working out “pretty good” is something of an understatement. Today, the couple own and operate Living Colors Nursery, a large-scale, high-volume bromeliad and orchid producer in Homestead, Florida, which includes extensive greenhouse and shade house facilities to support year-round production and shipping capabilities.

The storm and what comes after

To have a rainbow, one must weather a storm. That’s certainly true for Living Colors Nursery.

The first business the Rabins were involved in was Plants In Design. Mitch had started the company in his parents’ backyard with a friend. But he and his partner had been noticing differences in strategy and business opinions. And when the operation was devastated by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, it offered an inflection point.

Andrew made landfall in Florida twice: once in the Keys and again in Homestead before moving westward into the Gulf of Mexico. The storm was a monster, with a recorded windspeed of 212 miles per hour before it broke measuring equipment. The result of those massive winds was a landscape virtually scoured clean.

The Rabins saw the disaster as an opportune time to exit the business. It was a moment of reflection and decision.

“Hurricane Andrew kind of wrapped that up,” Mitch says. “And that was time for us to move on and start our own thing.”

Patty remembers the aftermath vividly. After all, it wasn’t just the business that had been devastated. Their house was destroyed, too.

“We had to make some decisions whether or not we were going to stay in South Florida or move up to Central Florida,” she says. “We were living in a 35-by-8-foot trailer in our front yard. And we would sit there and talk about it and say, ‘Well, what do we want to do? Because we have a clean slate here to start fresh.’ And we made the decision to stay.”

Homestead was, in fact, home. It’s where friends and family were, and it was also the site of a plot of land for sale which had once been a lime grove before Andrew mowed down all the trees. Andrew had created a clean slate for the Rabins in more ways than one.

“We had a fresh start,” Patty says. “We had decided what types of bromeliads we wanted to grow and which ones we did not. We started talking about that before the first poles went in the ground.”

They settled on Guzmania for its ability to produce a fantastic array of colors, and from that, they landed on the name Living Colors. But the transition was stressful. Mitch in particular was concerned because bromeliads are a 12-month crop, and 12 months of product needed to be paid for before growing.

“I really thought it would be hard to reconnect with customers after that interim period,” Mitch says. “But a good friend of ours, also a businessman, said, ‘People really connect with people, so they’re going to remember you.’ And it really did turn out that way.”

In January 1994, the Rabins closed on the one-time lime grove and were finally ready to get back to the business of growing. It was an auspicious month for more than one reason: It also marked the year their daughter Brielle was born. By May of that year, not only were they building a business, but they were also rebuilding a home and raising a newborn.

“It was challenging, but we overcame it,” Patty says. “I think Mitch and I are real pioneers.”

Welcome to the plant factory

Today, Living Colors Nursery comprises 3 acres of production under glass and 4 acres of outdoor production under shade cloth. They grow 30 to 35 different varieties of bromeliads, including Neoregelia and bare root Tillandsia, along with orchids like Dendrobium, Vanda and Oncidium.

Patty, Living Colors’ vice president and production manager, notes that they bring in around 50,000 young plants per month and ship out about 50,000 finished plants per month. Every bit of space available is used for production. That’s important, considering that at any given time, they have 800,000 plants on-site, about 20% of those being orchids.

The nursery is also the licensed propagator of Medinilla magnifica, a chandelier-like plant from the Philippines with wildly intricate blooms. It caught the attention of garden center retailers at the 2025 TPIE show and earned a Garden Center Group-sponsored Cool Product Award.

The nursery employs about 40 people year-round, many of whom have been with the company for 15 to 25 years. They do not use the H-2A visa program, instead drawing workers from the local community. The majority of their employees are women, which leads Patty and Mitch to call Living Colors a “women-powered business.”

The nursery’s primary customers are interiorscapers, wholesalers, high-end garden centers and garden center brokers. The couple decided early on not to focus on big-box sales.

“Mitch and I made a commitment when we started that we were not going to sell to the big-box stores because we did not want to lower our standards of the quality of the plants that we grow,” Patty says.

Their greenhouse production occurs in two houses. The oldest is a 2-acre house that is naturally vented with humidity and heat controlled by a Netafim fog system and Microgrow greenhouse controller.

Their most sophisticated house is a 1-acre gutter-connected build from GGS. It’s primarily used for young plants and features exhaust fans, cooling pads, light curtains and Dutch-style rolling benches. Mitch says it’s his favorite greenhouse.

“You’ve got so many controls, and the plants just do so well in there,” Mitch says. “Pretty much all our young plants start in there, and it feeds the whole nursery. It’s really helped our turns by having more climate control over the young plants, which leads to more even and better production numbers and throughput.”

Growing Guzmania is a gas

Production at Living Colors Nursery is a year-round and nonstop affair. And while every crop is unique, there is a step in growing Guzmania that most growers of annuals or perennials don’t have to consider: They need to be “gassed.”

When ethylene gas is applied to Guzmania bromeliads, it forces flowering (the production of the colorful bracts they are known for). This allows Living Colors to precisely time their crops to seasonal sales — getting plants with fall-colored bracts to garden centers at the end of September, for instance.

The production cycle at Living Colors is planned based on when the plants will be treated with the gas, rather than when the young plants arrive.

Mitch explains the gassing process: First, he connects an electric sprayer with a 100-gallon tank to a separate tank of ethylene gas. The gas is then bubbled into the water in the tank for 5 to 10 minutes. This ethylene-infused water is sprayed over the bromeliads. Typically, the treatment needs to occur two or three times to get the desired flowering response.

But as sophisticated as the process might seem, it’s not beyond the reach of homeowners. And that’s a particular opportunity, because many plant lovers who buy bromeliads will notice the plants create pups at the end of their life cycle. The pups can be propagated, and their bloom can be forced without ethylene gas.

“You can harvest the pups off of the plant usually when they’re about one-third the height and then replant them,” Patty explains. “Then you can take half of an apple and put it at the base of the plant, cover the entire plant with, for example, a dry cleaning bag, and leave it with the apple in the shade for 24 hours. What you’re doing is you’re creating an ethylene gas environment and, hopefully, if there’s enough ethylene gas coming off of the apple, anywhere from 12 to 16 weeks later, you’ll get a flower off of that plant.”

A colorful family future

Brielle Rabin remembers growing up in the greenhouse. It’s been a part of her life since she was a baby.

“If you were to take a look around, I can point on the concrete where I had my name carved into the freshly poured concrete in a couple spots around the nursery,” she says.

Now 31, Brielle is a sales and marketing specialist for Living Colors and is still leaving her mark on the company, just not in cement. She is moving the company into the modern world.

One of her biggest projects has been enabling a digital live availability list for the nursery’s customers. At one time, the only way for customers to know Living Colors’ availability was a weekly email. But now, working with PlantANT, Brielle can have the full live list available on the Living Colors website.

Brielle has also established the nursery’s presence on social media platforms. It makes sense considering how beautiful the plants are — it’s as if they were made to be Instagram stars.

This wasn’t the career path Brielle had planned. She had initially wanted to be an educator. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, she realized that it wasn’t really for her and joined her parents at their business, where her younger brother also works.

Since being in the industry, she feels it’s where she wants to stay.

“I do see that being in the horticulture industry is where I will be for the rest of my life,” she says. “I don’t regret going to school for education. I think there’s a strong psychology background there, which helps me communicate with customers, communicate with our staff, our team. If I could go back in time, I would go back and get a degree in business and agriculture, but I think I’m going to be OK without it.”

Patty and Mitch have been thrilled to have their daughter on board. They’re particularly excited about her marketing know-how and the way she’s taken the nursery into the digital age. But they remain active owners. Retirement is possible, but it’s too early to tell who will take the reins.

For the moment, Brielle is content to enjoy the time with her parents.

“I’m really grateful that I can be there for them,” she says, tearing up. “It’s a very special thing that I get to be able to do. The role that I’m in wears many hats, just like their role wears many hats, and it’s rooted deeply in pride for me. I am able to help them continue the legacy that they’ve built for their whole lives.”

Patrick Alan Coleman is editor of Greenhouse Management magazine. Contact him at pcoleman@gie.net.