Category: Tropical Style

Whether you live in the tropics or are experiencing a heat wave on your climate, maintaining summer vegetable gardens can be challenging if you’ve selected plants that favor mild temperatures. These veggies and herbs, however, flourish in hot temperatures and develop so fast that you’ll barely have the ability to maintain. Here’s the way to…

March will not be the same around my backyard this season. After somewhere between 10 and 20 decades, our Ceanothus ‘Ray Hartman’ went out in blaze of glory that was blue. Every spring you could count on a few weeks of a bulk of the smartest, deepest blue, as big as two or even three…

A specimen tree that’s distinctive and appealing, and provides yearlong interest, makes sense in a garden; it’s helpful, hardworking and will perform year after season. Saucer magnolia (Magnolia x soulangeana) performs especially in one season — perhaps even in only one month — than during the remainder of the calendar year, by far. But quantify…

In gardens that are abundant, as in most plants, gardens, ornamentation and architecture are used as private expressions of someone’s design philosophy. To make the sense of spontaneity, your gestures are often as easy as putting a ceramic pot among a color garden’s lender of ferns or even including a very small figure perched on…

Greens and blues create a relaxing backyard palette, but they want a small light to wake them up — especially if daylight is waning and an increasing number of time outside is spent between sunset and sunrise. If you’re looking for low maintenance, high-impact white color and textural contrast, take a look at cushion Length.…

Once you understand how and where to look, distinguishing a black gum tree (Nyssa sylvatica) from a live oak (Quercus spp.) Becomes simple. Form, foliage, flowers and vegetables all highlight the gaps between these trees. Black gum simplifies the task once it drops its leaves for winter. A live oak — as its name implies…

My backyard just turned 6 years of age. For years, I kept buying new crops to fill in the gaps — even after I’d no openings left. It got to the point where if I had been near a nursery when running errands, I would poke my head and nab a few things — especially…

If you’re looking for a great houseplant to give your decor a tropical flair, then Strelitzia,commonly known as bird of heaven,won’t disappoint. While it’s often wrongly known as a banana plant (it is a toast), you won’t find any bananas growing, however if you’re lucky (or rather, if a plant is truly joyful) following three…

Sometimes we dismiss a great design plant because we’re more used to watching it over the street than at a manicured backyard, or because it has the word”marijuana” in its ordinary name. Joe Pye weed is one such plant. This indigenous, frequently overlooked beauty grows up to 7 feet tall, adds showy purplish blossoms in…