Garden Blog - Top Tropicals

Date: 15 Aug 2025

Climbing 10 feet for Vanilla Beans!

Vanilla Bean Orchid - Vanilla planifolia

⭐️ Climbing 10 feet… for Vanilla Beans!

  • ⚡️ One of our Vanilla Bean Orchids at TopTropicals has big ambitions - it's already climbed 10 feet up a pine tree! We’re waiting (impatiently!) for those elegant yellow-green flowers, which will hopefully turn into vanilla beans.
  • ⚡️ Vanilla Bean Orchid (Vanilla planifolia) is the plant behind that sweet, comforting vanilla flavor we all love. It starts off like any potted orchid, but soon sends out aerial roots and becomes a climber, wrapping itself around trees or trellises. In its natural habitat, it grows high into forest canopies, but in the garden it will happily scale any sturdy support you give it.
  • ⚡️ Once established, it flowers and sets the long green pods we call vanilla beans. Growing your own is a lesson in patience - from flower to dried bean can take month - but nothing beats harvesting your own vanilla for the kitchen.


📚 Learn more:



📱How to produce your own vanilla: secrets of hand-pollination.

🛒 Climb toward your own beans

#Shade_Garden #Container_garden #Food_Forest

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Date: 14 Aug 2025

Homegrown coffee - the journey begins

Coffee tree - Coffea arabica

☕️ Homegrown coffee - the journey begins!

Coffee trees (Coffea arabica) that you saw blooming at Top Tropicals in May with fragrant, gardenia-like flowers, now in August - they are loaded with fruit! We will update on them once they turn red and ripe...

🛒 Start your own coffee harvest

📚 Learn more:


#Food_Forest #Container_Garden #Shade_Garden

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Date: 9 Aug 2025

Anthurium with leaves longer than you!

Anthurium vittariifolium- Long Leaf Anthurium

🍃 Anthurium with leaves longer than you!

  • 🌿 Ever seen an Anthurium with leaves longer than you are tall? Anthurium vittariifolium - Long Leaf Anthurium - is a true rainforest treasure from South America. Its strap-like leaves can reach an incredible 6 feet in length but stay only about 2 inches wide, creating elegant green ribbons that drape down like a waterfall.
  • 🌿 Grow it in a hanging basket and you’ll get a cascading curtain of foliage that instantly turns any space into a jungle hideaway.
  • 🌿 As if the leaves weren’t enough, this rare beauty produces clusters of bright pink berries that pop against the deep green leaves, adding an unexpected splash of color!
  • 🌿 It's rare, it's dramatic, and it's the kind of plant that makes people stop and ask, “What on earth is THAT?”


🛒 Grow the 6-foot leaf Anthurium

📚
Learn more:
#Nature_Wonders #Container_Garden #Shade_Garden
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Date: 5 Aug 2025

Blue lips smell like violets - Mazabuka, Sclerochiton harveyanus

Sclerochiton harveyanus - Mazabuka, Blue Lips

👄 Blue lips smell like violets
  • 💙 Sclerochiton harveyanus - Mazabuka, or Blue Lips blooms with quirky blue-to-purple flowers that really do look like lips. And in the tropical plant world, blue flowers are rare. And they are lightly violet-lavender-fragrant!
  • 💙 Even better? It's a total shade lover. No need for blazing sun - this beauty is happy to bloom in the cool, leafy spots of your garden.
  • 💙 Loved by bees and birds, and just the right mix of weird and wonderful.


🛒 Add Blue Lips to your shade garden

📚 Learn more:


#Perfume_Plants #Shade_Garden #Butterfly_Plants
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Date: 3 Aug 2025

Caught on camera: found this on the Flower of Caipora

Ruellia affinis - Flower of Caipora

🌺 Caught on camera: found this on the Flower of Caipora.
  • 🍁 Ruellia affinis, the Flower of Caipora - is a rare tropical gem from the forests of Brazil, with tropical red blooms when you need them most!
  • 🍁 This isn't your typical Ruellia. It's a climbing, vining shrub that puts out blazing red flowers in winter when most plants are taking a nap especially during Fall-Winter holidays.
  • 🍁 You can let it vine up a trellis or pinch it back to make a bushy, compact shape. Either way, those scarlet blooms will pop once the older stems mature.
  • 🍁 Just give it light shade, warmth, and moisture - and it'll reward your patience with color when you least expect it!


🛒 Limited! Get Flower of Caipora, hard-to-find tropical bloomer

📸 What's on the plant? Anyone knows the name of this Moth?

#Shade_Garden #Container_Garden

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