Month: April 2015

Rare & Unusual Tropical Trees & Plants, Flowering, Fruit, Native, Palm, Bamboo, Heliconia, Hummingbird, Butterfly

Fragrance for Your Yard

One of the many benefits of growing tropical plants is the ability to surround oneself with species that produce a fragrance. With judicious selection, a homeowner can have something sweet-smelling in flower just about year-round and can even satisfy a preference for daytime or nighttime scents. Following is a survey of some of the fragrant…
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April 24, 2015 0

The palm from . . . where?

To say that Dypsis cabadae has taken a long, tortuous path to discovery would be a major understatement. Superficially, it appeared that the species was first found in the early 1950s in the garden of a Dr. Cabada near Cienfuegos, Cuba, but it could not be identified. After Cabada’s death, the director of Harvard University’s nearby Atkins Garden…
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April 18, 2015 0

Another Role for Stoppers

We last dealt with the trees known as stoppers in an article published on the Richard Lyons’ Nursery website on March 2, 2013. Legend has it that these species got that common name because their constituents were used in concoctions to stop, er, uh, intestinal problems. An alternate, more pleasant explanation is that these plants could be used to create a thicket capable…
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April 10, 2015 0