Garden Blog - Top Tropicals

Can you eat bird-looking flowers? You can eat the whole tree!

• 🐧 Sesbania grandiflora - Hummingbird Tree - is named for its flowers resembling little birds.
• 🐧 It produces a mass of large, 3-4", curved flowers from November to June. Flowers can be coral red or white.
• 🐧 The fun part is - the flowers are edible! As well as the rest of the plant: tender leaves, green fruit (bean pods), and flowers, used in curries, salads, or fried in batter.
• 🐧 Medicinal uses: bark, leaves, gums, and flowers have medicinal properties.
• 🐧 Lower branches form a beautiful floral canopy. It is a fast growing, but a small tree that will fit any yard. Great everblooming tree for container culture.

🛒 Get an edible Hummingbird Tree

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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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⭐️ Does Barleria Lavender Lace really have striped flowers

• 🔮 Looking for an easy, compact, beautiful shrub that takes both sun and shade? Barleria cristata Lavender Lace (Striped Philippine Violet) is a rare and stunning variety perfect for fall and winter blooms.
• 🔮 Striking lavender-and-white-striped trumpet-shaped blooms appear in clusters from Fall through Winter. They are truly striped! 👀
• 🔮 Grows to about 3 feet tall, perfect as a garden hedge or shaped into neat geometrical forms with minimal pruning.
• 🔮 Needs some sun for profuse flowering and occasional pruning to encourage bushy growth.
• 🔮 Can handle cooler temperatures, making it a reliable fall and winter bloomer.

🛒 Plant Lavender Lace

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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.

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🌼 #Trees - Spectacular flowering tropical trees.

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TopTropicals

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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💐 What plant is fragrant, easy and fast growing? Cashmere Bouquet!

Clerodendrum bungei - Glory Bower, Cashmere bouquet.

🌸 Need a fast growing, spreading shrub for privacy? Cashmere bouquet is a shrub with benefits - the flowers are beautiful and sweetly fragrant.

Also ideal for the container grown patio plant.

Attracts butterflies to the large flower trusses.

🌡 Hardy to zone 8.

🛒 Order online

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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👇

🛒 Shop showy Cassia trees

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💐 What is the best flowering shrub for a shady spot?

• 🚩 Aphelandra is hands down one of the best solutions for a shade garden where you want to see more colors. It is a great addition to a collectible tropical butterfly garden, can grow into 4-5" tall bushy specimen. Tolerates both sun and shade.
• 🚩Aphelandras have beautiful lush foliage and showy, long terminal inflorescences throughout the warm season.
• 🚩These flowers are loved by hummingbirds.
• 🚩Aphelandra hartwegiana - Yellow Aphelandra. Yellow flowers emerge out of long orange stalks in the fall time. Pretty and unusual!
• 🚩Aphelandra squarrosa Dania (Snow White) - White Zebra Plant. It is also one of the best house plants, not only pretty because of its white-veined "Zebra" foliage, but also for the apical inflorescence with its beautiful yellow bracts.
• 🚩Aphelandra sinclairiana - Panama Queen, has extremely tropical look and fragrant flowers of unusual color combination: orange and pink.
• 🚩Aphelandra x panamensis - Scarlet Candle - a rare hybrid with bright red flowers

📚 Learn more from previous posts:
Panama Queen
How to grow Zebra in container?

🛒 Shop Aphelandras

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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!

🛒 Order Blue Butterfly Bush

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