🎉 This Saturday: Fall Planting Kickoff & Plant Market - September 5!

The best planting season is almost here, and we're kicking it off with a BIG Plant Day at Top Tropicals!

🌱 30% OFF all plants

🌱 Cold-Hardy Avocados & Tough Tropicals
🌱 Rare Finds + $10 Specials + BOGO Deals
🌱 FREE Green Magic fertilizer samples

🎁 Gift Bags + Plant Raffle
🎵 Music + Snacks + Drinks
🐈 And, of course, our #PeopleCats will be supervising the whole operation!

✅ Plant Smart Before Winter

Come find beautiful, unusual, Florida-tough plants and get your garden ready for whatever the next season brings.

📅 Saturday, September 5

📍 Fort Myers Garden Center + Sebring Farm

📱 Event discounts and specials valid at both locations:

✦ Ft Myers Garden Center: 13890 Orange River, Ft Myers, FL
✦ Sebring Farm: 9100 McRoy Rd, Sebring, FL

🎁 Learn more about this Event, Holiday deals and extras

#PeopleCats

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🐾 Daily Cat Lesson #11: Are Cats Good for Your Health?

Living with a cat may be good for more than just your mood.
Research has linked interacting and living with pets, including cats, with several benefits:

• 🐾 Less stress.
  Petting a friendly cat and simply spending quiet time together can help us relax and reduce feelings of stress.
• 🐾 Companionship.
  Cats provide company, routine and a comforting presence, especially for people who live alone.
• 🐾 A reason to slow down.
  Cats are remarkably good at doing absolutely nothing. Sit down with one for a while and somehow doing nothing starts to seem like a perfectly legitimate activity.
• 🐾 The power of touch.
  Petting an animal can be soothing, and that quiet physical contact may help reduce anxiety and promote relaxation.
• 🐾 Routine and purpose.
  Someone needs breakfast. Someone needs dinner. Someone has very strong opinions about when both should occur. Caring for an animal adds structure to the day.
• 🐾 More social connection.
  Cats give people something to talk about, laugh about, photograph and share. Cat people have a remarkable ability to find one another.
• 🐾 And then there's purring.
  The science around whether a cat's purr has direct healing effects on humans is still uncertain, but there's no question that sitting beside a peacefully purring cat can be wonderfully calming.

So perhaps these two aren't sitting around doing nothing.
They're providing wellness services!

🐈📸 Top Tropicals rescued cats James Coconuts and Bob at PeopleCats.Garden.

🐈 Stay with us for your Daily Dose of Cat! #DailyCatLesson #PeopleCats

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No, It's Not an Orchid: 7 Weird Questions About Bat Flower

Look at a White Bat Flower (Tacca integrifolia) for the first time and questions are inevitable.
Is that one giant flower? Is it an orchid? Are those really whiskers? And what happens after this crazy thing finishes blooming?
Let's investigate.

1. Is that giant thing the flower?

Nope.
Those enormous white "wings" are bracts - modified leaves, not petals.
The actual flowers are the much smaller dark purple-maroon structures clustered underneath. One Tacca display can contain numerous individual flowers.
So what looks like one enormous flower is actually an elaborate floral arrangement.

2. Then what are those crazy whiskers?

They're not petals either.
The long dangling "whiskers" are specialized threadlike bracteoles. They can extend far below the flower cluster and are responsible for much of Tacca's unmistakable bat-like appearance.
Wings that aren't petals. Whiskers that aren't whiskers. 😾
Botany likes making things complicated.

3. Is White Bat Flower an orchid?

Not even close.
Despite its exotic, orchid-like appearance, Tacca belongs to Dioscoreaceae - the yam family.
Yes. Yams.
That glamorous white bat hanging above your tropical garden has more botanical family connection to a yam than to an orchid.

4. Is White Tacca just a different color of Black Bat Lily?

No - and this is a common misconception.
The famous Black Bat Flower is generally Tacca chantrieri. White Bat Flower is Tacca integrifolia.
They're close relatives, but different species, not simply different-colored versions of the same plant.

5. Which is more spectacular - White or Black?

Now we're leaving science and entering dangerous territory.
Black Tacca is dark, mysterious, and wonderfully strange.
White Tacca has enormous pale bracts contrasting with dark flowers and long whiskers, making the entire structure easier to see - especially in a shady tropical garden.
We have both, but if we had to choose?
Team White Tacca.

6. Don't cut that bat flower! Here's what happens if you leave it alone.

What happens when the flowers are finished? The show isn't necessarily over.
If pollination is successful, the flowers can develop into fleshy fruits containing seeds.
So resist the temptation to immediately cut off every fading flower if you want to watch the entire Tacca life cycle unfold.

7. So, why does this plant look like a bat at all?

That's the really interesting question.
The "bat" we see is our interpretation of a complicated structure made from bracts, flowers, and long bracteoles.
Nature wasn't necessarily trying to build a bat.
But somehow it ended up with white wings, a dark little face, and enormous whiskers anyway.
And we're certainly not complaining.

Plenty of plants grow beautiful flowers. Very few leave you wondering what on Earth you're looking at.

🛒 Shop Tacca Bat Head Lilies

📚 Learn more:

Tacca chantrieri in Plant Encyclopedia
7 Mistakes That Keep a White Bat Flower From Blooming
The SECRET growers never tell you: simple trick how to bring Tacca back to life and keep green
Did you know that Tacca is a cat?
Tacca wants to be a cat - and everyone loves cats
Perfect Halloween plant: Black Bat Lily (Tacca)
When plants cross into the Gothic: the Darker Bat Lily
What is the rarest Tacca?
The mystery of the White Bat Lily - the plant with wings and whiskers
A flying bat with whiskers
The rarest Green Tacca - Tacca leontopetaloides
When Bat Head Devil Flower is in bloom
Bat Head - Devil Flower

🎥 ' target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Black Tacca • ' target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">White Tacca

#Container_Garden #Shade_Garden #Nature_Wonders #Discover #Fun_facts

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🐾 Daily Cat Lesson #10: Why Is My Cat Melting on the Floor?

Legs stretched out.
Belly flat against the tile.
Cat apparently turning into a furry puddle.

• 🐾 Is he cooling himself?
  Very possibly! On a hot day, cats often stretch out on cool surfaces such as tile. Spreading the body out increases contact with the cooler surface and helps transfer some body heat away.
• 🐾 Do cats sweat?
  Yes, but not like we do. Cats have sweat glands in their paw pads, so you may even notice damp little paw prints when a cat is hot or stressed.
  But sweating isn't their main cooling system.
• 🐾 How else do cats cool themselves?
  They seek shade and cool surfaces, reduce activity, stretch out instead of curling into a heat-conserving ball, and groom themselves. As saliva evaporates from the coat, it can provide some cooling.
• 🐾 Why are water bowls especially important in hot weather?
  Cats don't always have a strong urge to drink, so make water easy to find. Keep several bowls of fresh water around the house, especially in places where your cat likes to rest. Wide, clean bowls are often preferred, and some cats drink more from a fountain.
  Wet food also adds a significant amount of water to a cat's daily intake.
  ❗️Multi-cat household note: don't make one water bowl "the water bowl". Several water stations give cats choices and make it more likely they'll encounter water during the day.
  🐾 Do cats pant like dogs?
  Cats can pant, but regular panting isn't normal for a relaxed cat the way it is for a dog. A cat panting because of heat may already be getting too hot, especially if there's drooling, weakness, confusion or very rapid breathing. Move the cat to a cool area and offer water; significant or persistent panting needs prompt veterinary attention.

So when your cat dramatically collapses belly-first onto the coolest tile in the house - he may not be lazy!
He has simply discovered air conditioning without the electric bill!

🐈📸 Top Tropicals rescued cat Simon at PeopleCats.Garden.

🐈 Stay with us for your Daily Dose of Cat! #DailyCatLesson #PeopleCats

🟢 Join 👉 TopTropicals

🦋 5 secrets how to turn your garden into a butterfly magnet

For over a month now, Eastern Tiger Swallowtails have been all over our garden, every single day. This female was dancing from flower to flower on a blooming Cashmere Bouquet (Clerodendrum bungei). This large native swallowtail butterfly is easy to recognize by its yellow wings and bold black "tiger" stripes. The beautiful blue coloring on the hindwings tells us this one is most likely a female. Seeing a butterfly like this in the garden isn't just luck. Give butterflies what they need, and they'll find you!

1. 🦋1. Plant flowers for nectar
   Butterflies need nectar, and some flowers are much better at providing it than others. Plant plenty of nectar-rich flowers and, when possible, group them together. A big patch of blooms is much easier for a passing butterfly to find than one lonely flower.
   Our experience? Clerodendrums are great butterfly magnets. When they're blooming, the butterflies always find them. That's why we have Clerodendrums all over the garden.
2. 🦋2. Don't forget the caterpillars
   This is the part people often miss. A butterfly garden isn't just about feeding adult butterflies.
   Butterflies need the right host plants to lay their eggs. Their caterpillars then feed on those plants. Different butterflies need different hosts, so find out which butterflies live in your area and plant for the whole life cycle.
   No caterpillars - no next generation of butterflies.
3. 🦋3. Be very careful with pesticides
   You can't invite butterflies into the garden and then spray everything that crawls.
   Butterfly caterpillars are insects too. Broad-spectrum insecticides can kill the very caterpillars you're trying to attract. In a butterfly garden, a few chewed leaves aren't necessarily a problem. Sometimes they're proof that your garden is working.
4. 🦋4. Give them sunshine and shelter
   Butterflies love warm, sunny areas because they rely on outside heat to warm their bodies. But an exposed, windy garden isn't ideal either.
   The best butterfly gardens have both: sunny feeding areas and nearby plants that provide shelter from wind and weather.
5. 🦋5. Give them a place to drink
   Butterflies don't only visit flowers. Some will gather on damp soil, mud or wet sand to take in water and dissolved minerals, a behavior called puddling.
   You don't need a fancy butterfly fountain. A shallow damp spot or a little wet sand can do the job.
   And one more flower worth planting...

💡That Eastern Tiger Swallowtail kept returning to our Cashmere Bouquet for a reason. Clerodendrum bungei produces big clusters of nectar-rich pink flowers, and butterflies notice.
In fact, Clerodendrums are some of our most reliable butterfly-attracting plants. When they're in bloom, there's usually something fluttering around them.
Plant flowers. Plant host plants. Leave room for caterpillars. Add sun, shelter and a little water. Then watch who discovers your garden.

🛒 Transform your yard into a Butterfly Haven with exotic plants

📚 Learn more:

· Clerodendrum bungei in Plant Encyclopedia
· 13 tropical flowers to plant in spring to attract pollinators year around
· Butterfly Haven or a Heaven on Earth?
· Top 20 plants for a Butterfly Haven
· Five best butterfly attractors for a Southern garden
· Top Eight irresistible vines for a hummingbird haven:
Part 1 • Part 2

#Hedges_with_benefits #Butterfly_Plants #How_to #Discover

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