Cold protection for tropical plants

Pushing the limits of tropical gardening

The year is almost over but the winter is not. This Christmas weekend at our Sebring B-farm we had it down to 30F. As a tropical gardener, winter can be challenging, especially if you grow plants outside of tropical zones.

To protect your garden from the cold, consider the following:

1. Monitor freeze watches and be prepared to take action if necessary.
2. Create temporary structures like mini-greenhouses using PVC pipes, carport frames, or bamboo sticks to support covers.
3. Use covers such as frost cloth, cardboard boxes, blankets, and bed sheets.
4. Use Christmas lights and other heating elements, including propane heaters, to keep plants warm.
5. Add a layer of heavy mulch around plant trunks to protect them from the cold.
6. Apply plant boosters that improve cold hardiness, such as Sunshine Epi, Sunshine-Si, and Sunshine Superfood.

At TopTropicals B-Farm, we sprayed our plants with a special cold hardiness treatment Sunshine-Si and covered and wrapped everything we could. We also moved cold sensitive species inside greenhouses. All of our plants are looking great and happy!

Photo above: Mulching mango trunks and using Christmas lights for cold protection

Read more about this special treatment plan: Cold Hardiness Improvement Kit.

Photo above: Temporary wrapping of a section of a greenhouse with a plastic or frost cloth protects from a windchill. It may also win you a few degrees even without a heater. In this particular case, according to our temp sensors, it was 30F outside, and 41F inside this "dome", no heaters used.

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🔮 The Search for Enchanted Incense

Sunshine: John said it smelled like a thousand jasmines.
Smokey: And somehow that's all the information he brought back from Thailand.
Sunshine: He brought a photo, too.
Smokey: Excellent. We can begin our international manhunt.

Well, Smokey and Sunshine have closed the case and found the mystery plant. The cork board is coming down, the magnifying glass is back in the drawer, and the "Enchanted Incense" mug is finally empty. Now let's talk about the plant itself.

🌸 Some plants arrive with a label. Some arrive with a story.

When our good friend John Mood returned from a plant conference in Thailand, he did not bring us a plant. He brought us a mystery.

John had spent decades growing and collecting rare tropical plants. When he said he had found something special, we paid attention.

On a visit to Chatuchak Market, one of the most famous plant markets in Asia, something stopped him. Not the flowers. The fragrance.

That one sentence stayed with us for years.

He had photographs. He had his memory of that scent. What he did not have was a name. No tag. No seller information. Just the photos and the certainty that he had smelled something genuinely unusual.

So we started looking.

We showed the photographs around. We asked collectors. We compared flowers. Every lead turned into another question. But eventually, after years of searching on and off, we found it.

The mystery plant turned out to be an unusual Cerbera unlike anything we had grown before. Today we call it Enchanted Incense. Fragrance lovers recognized immediately what John had recognized in that Bangkok market. This was not just another pretty tropical flower.

🌸 The Plant

Visitors at our nursery still walk past it and stop. Not because they noticed the plant. Because they noticed something in the air and could not figure out where it was coming from.

The flowers start soft pink and white, then deepen to rich red and auve as they mature. They come in clusters, four to five inches across, and the fragrance they produce does not stay close to the flower. It moves. It fills the space around the plant. On a warm morning it can perfume an entire patio.

The foliage is worth mentioning too. Deep green leaves with burgundy and mauve tones that make it attractive even when it is not blooming. The growth habit is slow and slightly weeping, similar to plumeria, which is no coincidence since they are close relatives. Unlike plumeria, Enchanted Incense stays evergreen in warm climates.

It is a compact, slow-growing small tree that is happy in a container. That makes it practical for gardeners in colder climates who need to bring it in for winter, and for anyone who wants a fragrant plant near a seating area rather than somewhere across the yard.

🌸 Why We Grow It

We grow thousands of plants, and most can be described in a sentence or two.

This one cannot.

A large Enchanted Incense grows right outside our office. Every year it reminds us why we spent so much time searching for it.

Visitors stop beside it and ask the same question: "What is that smell?"

They usually notice the fragrance before they notice the plant.

Some follow the scent across the nursery. Others stop in the middle of a conversation and start looking around. Nearly everyone ends up standing next to the tree trying to figure out where that incredible fragrance is coming from.

In a world full of beautiful tropical plants, Enchanted Incense remains one of the few that announces itself before you even see it.

That is why we love growing it.

🛒 Add Enchanted Incense to your collection

Growing Tips

• Light: Full sun is best (at least six hours daily). It will tolerate partial shade but blooms much more generously in good light.
• Watering: Water regularly during warm weather. In cool weather and winter, keep the soil on the drier side. Overwatering when temperatures are low is the most common mistake.
• Soil: Use a well-draining mix. This plant absolutely does not want wet feet.
• Fertilizer: Feed with a Green Magic controlled-release fertilizer for flowering plants in spring, supplemented with occasional liquid fertilizer through the summer. For non-stop blooms without the risk of salt build-up in containers, we highly recommend Sunshine Boosters™. Read our Guide to Sunshine Boosters™ and Green Magic fertilizer
• Winter Care: Bring it indoors when temperatures approach the mid-30s°F. The rootstock is fairly tough, but the foliage is not. Cold and wet conditions combined are the real risk.

One Last Thing

John came back from Bangkok with a few photographs and a fragrance he could not forget. It took us years to track down the plant behind that memory. We have never regretted a single minute of the search.

🛒 Grow Enchanted Incense

📚 Learn more from our Blog

🍓The Strawberry Moon Rises: A Gardener's Excuse to Go Outside

Sunshine: Look at my strawberry-glazed donut. Same as the Strawberry Moon. I have been waiting for this all month. They say moon gardening is useful. Let's go planting!
Smokey: Science hasn't found much evidence for it.
Sunshine: Then what's the point?
Smokey: If the moon gets people into the garden, that's good enough for me.

On the evening of Monday, June 29, 2026, the full Strawberry Moon will rise low in the southeastern sky. Whether you follow a lunar calendar or not, it's a good excuse to spend a little time outside on a summer evening.

🌛 What Is the Strawberry Moon, Exactly?

Many of the familiar full moon names come from Native American traditions and reflect seasonal events in nature. June's full moon was named for the season when wild strawberries ripen across much of North America, not for any color in the sky. Despite the name, the moon won't glow pink or red. If it looks warm or golden, that's simply because any full moon takes on an amber tint when it hangs low near the horizon, the same atmospheric effect that paints sunsets orange. The "strawberry" is about the harvest, not the hue.

This year, the Strawberry Moon rises on the evening of June 29 and will appear low in the southeastern sky, making it a particularly beautiful moon to watch as dusk settles in.

🌓 Moon Gardening, an Old and Honest Tradition

For generations, gardeners across Europe and beyond timed their planting, pruning, and harvesting to the phases of the moon. Plant root crops during a waning moon, some traditions say, and leafy crops during a waxing one. Prune during certain phases to slow regrowth, harvest herbs at others for better potency. These calendars were passed down through generations of careful observers who paid close attention to their land and their results, and many still follow them today.

Modern science has found little evidence that lunar gravity or moonlight significantly affects plant growth. Yet the tradition persists, and plenty of growers still find real value in the rhythm it brings to the gardening year.

💡What We Know For Sure

Here's the practical truth, and it's the same one Smokey arrived at after thinking it over. Whether or not the moon influences your plants, the act of walking through your garden definitely does. A moon-phase calendar that gets you outside to check on your plants, pull a few weeds, prune back something leggy, top off the mulch, or water a thirsty pot is helping your garden, regardless of what's happening overhead.

The benefit isn't necessarily lunar. It's attention.

A garden rarely thrives because of a single grand effort. It thrives because of dozens of small ones: a little pruning, a little watering, a few weeds pulled before they become many.

Gardens reward the gardeners who show up, and if a full moon is your reminder to show up, that's a perfectly good reason to keep watching the sky.

📅 Beyond the Harvest

Not everything in a garden needs to produce a yield to be worthwhile. Marking the seasons the way our ancestors did, a strawberry moon in June, a harvest moon in fall, a snow moon in February, gives us small, recurring reasons to notice what's changing around us. It's a rhythm, not a requirement.

Think of the Strawberry Moon as a good excuse to take a walk through the garden.

The Strawberry Moon doesn't have to improve anything to be worth celebrating. It only needs to get you outside on a warm June evening, which, honestly, isn't a high bar to clear.

A Strawberry Moon Collection, Just for Fun

Sunshine immediately concluded that any moon named after strawberries deserved a few strawberry-themed plants. We couldn't argue with that logic, so we pulled together a few Top Tropicals favorites that fit the theme.

🍓 Strawberry Tree

Strawberry Tree (Muntingia calabura), also known as Jamaican Cherry, grows quickly and produces dainty white flowers resembling strawberry flowers, followed by an abundance of small cotton-candy-sweet berries that birds, wildlife, gardeners and their kids all appreciate.

📚 Learn more from Top Tropicals Garden Blog

🍓 Strawberry Guava

Strawberry Guava (Psidium littorale) brings glossy foliage and sweet, perfumed fruit that tastes something like its namesake crossed with a guava.

🍓 Strawberry Dragon Fruit

Dragon Fruit Vietnamese Jaina Strawberry White (Hylocereus undatus ) produces bright pink fruit with refreshing white flesh and a flavor often described as a blend of strawberry, melon, and kiwi. Its enormous night-blooming flowers are every bit as impressive as the fruit, turning this vigorous climbing cactus into a spectacular summer showpiece.

🍓 Strawberry Ginger

Coral Ginger Borneo Strawberry Pink (Riedelia coralina) is one of the rarest gingers in cultivation, producing unusual strawberry-pink flower spikes that seem almost too exotic to be real. The edible blooms have a pleasant spicy fragrance and flavor, making this New Guinea treasure as interesting to taste as it is to admire.

Whether you came for the moon or the plants, we hope you discovered something interesting. They just happen to share a name with the moon overhead this June, and that felt like reason enough to give them a little spotlight.

🍓🌱 How to Grow Them

If you live in a frost-free climate (USDA Zones 10+), simply plant these strawberry gems in the ground and enjoy. Strawberry Guava can tolerate occasional frosts down to about 28F once established.

Not so lucky? Many gardeners successfully grow Strawberry Guava, Strawberry Dragon Fruit, and Strawberry Tree in containers, moving them indoors or to a protected location during winter. You don't need a tropical climate to enjoy tropical fruit.

🏡 See You Outside

Whether you believe in moon gardening or not, June 29 is a good night to step outside, find an open view of the southeastern sky, and watch the Strawberry Moon rise. Bring a cup of tea, walk the garden beds while there's still light, pull a few weeds, and let the evening settle in around you.

And that may be the real lesson of the Strawberry Moon.

👉Start your Strawberry Moon Collection