Garden Blog - Top Tropicals

🌺 The Drama you want in your garden: dazzling Medinilla!

• 🎀 Show-Stopping Blooms: The Medinilla plant is known for its spectacular, dramatic clusters of pink, pendulous flowers that cascade like floral chandeliers - perfect for turning heads!
• 🎀 Tropical Flair: With its lush, leathery leaves and exotic appearance, the medinilla adds a touch of the tropics to any indoor or outdoor space.
• 🎀 Conversation Starter: Its unique and eye-catching flowers make the Medinilla a true centerpiece, sparking admiration and conversation among garden visitors.
• 🎀 Low Maintenance: Despite its luxurious look, the Medinilla is surprisingly easy to care for, thriving in indirect light (loves shade!) and only moderate watering.
• 🎀 Pollinator's Delight: The vibrant blooms attract a variety of pollinators, making your garden not only more beautiful but also more buzzing with life 🐞🐝
• 🎀 Year-Round Beauty: Unlike many plants that only shine for a season, the Medinilla can bloom multiple times a year.

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💥 Why Yellow Aphelandra looks red?

👒 Aphelandra hartwegiana - Yellow Aphelandra - is getting ready to bloom! Soon it will be shooting its curious yellow flowers out of these "candles"... Stay with us to see it bloom!

📚 Learn more about Aphelandras from previous posts:

• 📍 What is the best flowering shrub for a shady spot?
• 📍 Panama Queen
• 📍 How to grow Zebra in container?

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🎄 What is the most excusive tropical Christmas flower?

• 🎅 A festive showstopper, Ruellia colorata, known as Colorama, is a rare and vibrant addition to exotic container plant collection. Its brilliant scarlet bracts color up for Christmas and stay bright carmine for several months.
• 🎅 Native to Brazil, this small plant grows 2-4 feet tall, displaying brilliant scarlet bracts and crimson flowers that stay bright for months, adding a touch of holiday cheer.
• 🎅 One of Colorama's most striking features is its photoperiodic response: the top leaves turn crimson red around Christmas time due to changes in daylight length, much like the beloved Poinsettia. After winter, these leaves return to green, keeping the plant lively and versatile year-round.

Photoperiodism is the process where plants respond to the length of day and night, triggering changes such as leaf coloration or flowering.
• 🎅 Its blooms are a magnet for butterflies and hummingbirds, making it a favorite for wildlife enthusiasts.
• 🎅 Colorama thrives in shady to semi-shady spots and requires regular watering to stay lush and healthy. It's perfect for USDA zones 9-11 but can also be grown in colder regions if protected from frost. For winter care in cooler climates, move it indoors or to a warm area to keep this stunning beauty happy and blooming.
• 🎅 When grown in pots, ensure good drainage, use rich organic soil, and place the plant in a bright location.
• 🎅 Prune twice a year to maintain its compact, bushy shape, and fertilize with a flowering fertilizer once established.

🛒 Get your own Exclusive Christmas Colorama

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🗂 Index of TopTropicals Telegram Channel

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#Butterfly_Plants - Butterfly attracting plants.

#Container_Garden - Plants suitable for container garden and indoor culture.

#Fertilizers - All the truth about fertilizers, plant food supplements, and our recommendations for different types of plants.

#Food_Forest - Fruit trees, Spice plants, and Edibles.
Including: #Avocado, #Mango, #Papaya, #Guava, #Jackfruit, #Loquat

📖 #Fun_Facts - interesting plant facts and legends.

🌳 #Hedges_with_benefits - Practical approach to your landscape and how to properly select showy and useful plants for your yard.

♍️ #Horoscope - Plant Horoscopes and Cat Horoscopes. Did you know that cats also have their Zodiac signs?

🛠 #How_to - Q&A about growing plants, tropical garden lifehacks.

👀 #Nature_Wonders - Unusual, amusing, outrageous, bizarre plants...

🐈 #PeopleCats - our Favorite PeopleCats (and some PeopleDogs, too).

🌸 #Perfume_Plants - Fragrant plants and perfume trees.

✍️ #Quotes - Interesting quotes.

#Recipes - Exotic recipes for tropical fruit and edibles.

💊 #Remedies - Medicinal plants.

☁️ #Shade_Garden - Plants suitable for low light conditions.

🌼 #Trees - Spectacular flowering tropical trees.

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Why is it called Blood Feather?

• A true gem for tropical plant enthusiasts, Sanchezia stenomacra - Blood Red Feather - is a rare and stunning perennial.
• Native to the jungles of Peru, it thrives in humid environments with filtered light, making it perfect for lush, shaded spots in your garden, greenhouse or indoor plant collection.
• Its striking blood-red flowers, shaped like delicate feathers, add a bold splash of color and are irresistible to hummingbirds. Feathery burgundy-red plumes rise above the deep green foliage and last for weeks. The true flowers are orange-red and tubular, emerging from the wispy flower heads day after day.
• Upright, vigorous grower. When plants become too large, they can take a hard pruning and quickly recover and re-flower. Flowering continuously throughout the year, it even does well under partial sun.
• A rare find for private collections, this showy plant is sure to become a centerpiece of your tropical paradise.

🛒 Order Blood Red Feather Sanchezia

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Why this blue tropical flower has a violet fragrance?

You already saw one unusual blue flower of Tropics - Lead Flower. This one is even more interesting!

👄 Mazabuka, or Blue Lips (Sclerochiton harveyanus) has mauve-blue, unusually lipped flowers that are lightly violet-lavender-fragrant!

• 💙 Blue Lips create a pretty floral display on this shade-loving shrub with its attractive glossy green foliage.
• 💙 Flowers are mauve-blue to purple and the lower petals are ribbed, giving the impression of lips, hence the common name.
• 💙 Five fringed lobes, equal in size, short and rounded, are the flowers distinguishing feature.
• 💙 Shade lover. Will happily bloom in the shade!

🐝🐦 The numerous flowers produced in summer are attractive to pollinating insects which encourage insect-feeding birds into the garden.

📚 Learn more: Surprising Violet fragrance of the Blue Lips

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What is the bluest flower of the Tropics?

Eranthemum pulchellum - Blue Sage, or Lead Flower is brightest gentian blue - very unusual color in the tropics!

• 💙 Winter heavy bloomer
• 💙 Attracts butterflies and bees 🐝
• 💙 Compact shrub, responds well to pruning.
• 💙 Shade lover. Will happily bloom in the shade!

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We Grow Happiness

🌈 How to add color to your yard.

• 
  🔜 Lovely Cassias we mentioned in earlier post are in full bloom today - they love the Summer Heat! They are our favorite Summer flowers.
• 
  🔜 Cassia (Senna) trees are compact, fast growing, tolerant to drought and poor soils, free-flowering and relatively cold hardy. Always a great choice!
• 
  🔜 Cassias come in several colors: yellow, orange, pink, red and rainbow.
• 
  🔜 Yellow-flowering cassias:

Senna surattensis (Cassia glauca) - Scrambled Egg Bush
Cassia siamea - Kassod Tree
Cassia didymobotrya - Popcorn Cassia
Senna alata - Empress Candles
Cassia occidentalis - Fedegoso, Coffee Senna
• 
  🔜 Pink/red and multi-color Rainbow cassias (which are hybrids between yellow and pink cassias):

Cassia grandis - Red Cassia
Cassia javanica - Apple Blossom Tree
Cassia marginata - Rainbow Shower Tree
Cassia roxburghii - Ceylon Senna
Cassia x nodosa - Pink Shower, Appleblossom.

❔ What cassias do you have in your garden?
Share photos in comments👇

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⚡️ #Fun_Facts: Why is it called Blue Butterfly?

Clerodendrum ugandense (Blue Butterfly): This plant's blue flowers and butterfly-like shape attract butterflies and other pollinators to the garden. So this plant is all about butterflies!

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