If you want to feed your taste for the exotic, check out some of these great tropical plants. And surprisingly, many of these plants are a lot hardier than you might think. Tony Avent, owner of Plant Delights Nursery in North Carolina, explains:
Part of the focus of nursery is to grow unusual plants. And having a background in tropicals, we decided to plant them out in the garden and find out what was actually hardy. A lot of things are hardy down to zero, which we term 'hardy tropical.'
We found an elephant ear's plant that had been growing for years. It had been passed down through a family for years. We tried it here, found out it's completely hardy, down to at least zero. So it's a good Zone 7-10 plant.
There's the soft velvet marrow. In addition to having wonderful leaves, it has beautiful pink flowers that occur from mid-summer through fall atop the seven- to nine-foot spikes. This native from the Deep South is completely hardy, at least down to zero. And in the winter we leave the stalks up. And the seedheads, where the former flowers were, are great for birds to perch on and get a snack.
The tropicals include a needle palm. It is native to a very small area down around Florida, where it was endangered for many years. We're propagating it and offering it for sale. We've found it to be reliable down to -15 to -20F. We estimate that the glaciers probably brought this down from somewhere like Ohio and just left it in Florida when they retreated. What makes this different from the palm that we see? If you look down at its base, you'll find that it has these long, knitting-like needles to help protect the seed from predators that would like to eat them.
A few more great tropical options include the fragrant ginger lily. It smells just like honeysuckle, and flowers from mid-August through fall. And the flamboyant and appropriately named turk's cap. The flower on the turk's cap never completely opens, creating a turban-like swirl. Finally, the lipstick-red hybrid coral bean. It's a perennial that grows up to eight feet tall.
Then there's purple pineapple. This is a common plant in the more tropical regions. We found that it was hardy. When we grew a lot of seedlings, we found one with incredible purple foliage. We named it 'Sparkling Burgundy'. Then we set about to propagate it. They didn't divide very fast, so we sent it to tissue culture labs and it came back one failure after another. We had almost given up the chance of ever getting this out to the public. Then I read a journal from England that said, 'by the way,' in small print, 'these are propagated from leaf cuttings.' So we went out, gave it a try and voila, 100% success.
So how do you do leaf cuttings? We take a knife and just cut the leaf. And we fill the pot full of soil. We smooth it out and we're ready to go. We found that even a little plant like this can produce 100 different plants. Does this work for all plants? It works for very few plants, actually. The old-fashioned snake plant that people grow as houseplants works well this way. So do African violets. But there are not a lot of other plants. Once they're rooted, we keep them moist. It will take them about a month to root. Then each small plant is ready to be potted into a container to grow.
You grow hardy tropicals just about anywhere that you have a warm season. When it starts getting cold, especially if you live in a colder region than USDA Zone 7, bring those plants indoors so that you can save them for next year."
Resources plantsPlant Delights Nursery, Inc.
Website:
www.plantdelights.com
Also in this Episode
)
)
)
