It has been four years since I first looked to purchase my house in Florida. It is incredible how times fly. The older you get the faster times seems to go. The plot of lawn that I purchased is now a full mature garden. I have made a few different sections. The flowers displayed in this blog all come from the Tropical Garden. It is hard to consider that Florida is all that tropical when it can freeze like in New Jersey. Fortunately, that has not happened too many times since I have been here and the tropicals have certainly benefited. These images represent some of my successes. One always buries failures in the garden and with weather in the nineties plants that are not established would certainly perish if they were not suited to the heat, intermittent tropical rain storms and lack of artificial irrigation. Everything shown is in one way or another properly adopted and receives no supplemental irrigation other than the rain falling from our Florida skies.
The above two photographs are of a plumeria purchased from a farmer's market. It was a three foot plant and now measures nearly ten and is covered in magnificent white flowers from May until November. The hybridizers sacrificed the fragrance for its magnificent blooms.
Seen in prior blogs: Cuban Jatropha which is stunning in color and form. I have now seen plants the size of trees throughout the area and I am having to rethink the plants that I considered to be shrubs for my garden.
Fire Bush (Hamelia patens) is an incredible hardy and drought tolerant plant that is often covered with butterflies or hummingbirds. Truly an exceptional plant that thrives on heat and blasting sun.
Mussaenda from Africa has an odd formation of parts making a flower and bracts. Somewhat like the Poinsettia with the little yellow center part as the flower and the colored bract that appears adjacent.
I cant remember this one's name it flowers in clusters like gladiolus but produces these funny shaped heads.
Another from Africa, the desert rose (Adenium) is not a rose but it is from the Namibian desert ; also incredibly drought tolerant.
Just your plain ordinary double pink Hibiscus.
One of the exotic Alpinias (Ginger). Gingers come from two different genus Alpinias and Zingivers. They can look similar but as you can see from these two they have nothing in common.
Another of my many ginger which produce varying types of flowers. These pine cones come up out of the ground adjacent where the ginger stalks are. Flower is totally separate plant structure from the leaf.
Brazilian Red Cloak (Megaskepasma erythrochlamys) quite a mouthful for a plant name has become the most important part of the tropical garden going in at a small 2 gallon pot, which has flourished to become at ten foot mass of color.
Another whose name escapes me now represents a wall of yellow flowers six feet high along the front edge of the garden wall.
year's ago I was given a small banana plant that I hoped would produce fruit for me. Well, as it happens it is not a sweet banana plant but a plantain and it is definitely working on a bunch of big bananas for cooking.
From the large to the smallest. A star jasmine that as a potted plant imbues the garden with an exotic and overwhelming fragrance.
It has been almost four years since I chose to come to Florida. I no longer need to take vitamin D due to a deficiency of sun that I suffered from long gray winters while living in New Jersey. It is not all perfect down here but living to 62 has taught me not to expect perfection anywhere except possibly in a garden. Happy Gardening...
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