👻 When plants grow wings...

🌴 Twilight in the garden. Smokey is holding a glowing pumpkin. Sunshine is sipping cocoa.

Sunshine: "Smokey, why does that plant look like it wants to fly away?"
Smokey: "That’s the Bat Lily - Tacca. It’s rare, it’s weird, and it’s in bloom just in time for Halloween."
Sunshine: "Figures. You always find the spooky ones."

Meet the Bat Lily (Tacca)

Tacca is also called the Bat Lily or Devil Flower. This tropical wonder grows bat-shaped wings and foot-long whiskers. The black form (Tacca chantrieri) looks straight out of a gothic dream, while the white one (Tacca nivea) is ghost-like and elegant.

Some of our plants are blooming right now in the nursery — true Halloween magic! Blooms are delicate and may not travel, but the plants are strong and will flower again soon in your care.

Black Bat Lily (Tacca chantrieri) with dark maroon wings and long whiskers

White Bat Lily (Tacca nivea) in bloom with wide ivory wings

"The White Bat Lily (Tacca nivea) is bold and sculptural, with oversized ivory wings that command attention. Its pale bracts stretch wide above clusters of deep maroon flowers, and long, silvery whiskers spill gracefully through the foliage. In filtered light, the plant seems to glow from within — elegant, crisp, and perfectly balanced between the strange and the beautiful. If I could pick, I’d go with the White Tacca. It feels more architectural, more balanced — those oversized wings catch light in a way that shows off every vein and curve. It looks engineered by nature, almost like an alien design prototype that actually works.

The Black Bat Lily (Tacca chantrieri) feels alive with shadow. Its dark maroon wings and wiry whiskers make it look like something that fluttered out of the jungle at dusk. The bloom’s layered structure and near-black sheen give it a quiet power — mysterious, understated, but impossible to ignore. But if I were designing mood lighting for a greenhouse at night, the Black Tacca wins. It’s subtle, mysterious, like a secret only visible up close. Together, they’re perfect opposites — yin and yang of the tropical underworld: white for daylight, black for moonlight." — says Tatiana Anderson, Top Tropicals Plant Expert

👉 Collect Tacca plants:

Black - Tacca chantrieri

White - Tacca nivea

Green - Tacca leontopetaloides

Healthy Plants: Q&A from Mr Booster

Fertilizing in Winter

Q: I have many tropical plants in my garden, both in the ground and in pots. I realize it is wintertime and some of them, the Hydrangea, Hibiscuses, and roses are in bloom but the rest of them seem wilty and droopy. Is it alright to fertilize them now, or should I wait for a few days? I have an all purpose tropical fertilizer and a 20-20-20 also. Please advise what to do.

A: During wintertime, tropicals may suffer from low temperatures and lack of sunshine which causes droopy leaves, and leaf loss.
Regardless of the cause and plant condition, you should NEVER apply traditional dry fertilizers during cool months. When cold, dry fertilizers (EDTA-chelated) may create nutrient lock up in soil and damage the roots. Dry fertilizers (both granulated and water-soluble) can be used only during hot season - when min temperatures stay above 65F for at least a week in a row, and daytime temperatures are over 75-80F. During hot, active growth season plant metabolism increases. This provides less chance for a chemical root burn, as the nutrients are used up quickly.

However, liquid fertilizers, as long as they are amino-acid based, can be used year round. From our own experience last winter, we discovered that fertilizing sickly looking plants (with signs of cold damage and root issues) with Sunshine Boosters actually revived those plants. Sunshine Boosters even brought back to life some hopeless specimens. Take a look at this gardenia that grows in our garden (picture above). See full article.
In your case, it would be beneficial to use a mild formula of liquid boosters in combination with Sunshine Epi -a natural plant hormone that boost their growth and helps to cope with cold-, temperature- and low-light-related stress.

These are the products we recommend:
- Sunshine Bombino - add to every watering
- Sunshine Epi - twice a month as foliage spray

Since you grow plants in pots, feeding program is especially essential, because plants are limited with a container size where roots can't reach out to more food in the outer soil. In professional nursery set up with injector irrigation systems, container plants are fed daily (depending on season, more than once a day) with every watering. This is why greenhouse plants are so healthy looking.
So feel free to give your plants Sunshine boosters with every watering, dozing according to the label. During cold period, plants need less frequent watering, so fertilizer input will be balanced accordingly, it will depend on temperature and plant metabolism.