Back to Florida

Since the largest of the trees have been placed in the conservatory and the fall show officially opened on the 14th, I was able to sneak back down to Florida for a few days. On the agenda for this tagging trip was to locate Cassia fistula which is the King's Tree, also Mangrove, Coconuts, and smaller understory ferns and aroids.

After flying into Tampa on October 14th, I was able to spend some time at the Exotic Plumeria Tropical Garden just outside of Tampa in Seffner, FL. (http://www.exoticplumeria.com/cplumeria.com/) After visiting Thailand this past winter I knew that a visit to this nursery would be very important. Plumeria trees ranging in size from 10" to upwards of 25" pots were available. I selected several of the larger Singapore Dwarf cultivars with fragrant white flowers, also some of the smaller pink and yellow flowered cultivars.

The next stop was in Punta Gorda, FL at Top Tropical's new nursery location (http://www.toptropicals.com/). Tatiana and Mike are frequent travelers to exotic locations. Each of their expeditions has yeilded many incredible fragrant, flowering and fruiting plants. It was wonderful to spend the day talking plants with these two knowledgable plantspeople. I was able to select many plants from their Thailand expedition including Thai Magnolia, Vietnamese Gardenia, Wrightia and lemon grass.



After finishing on the West Coast of Florida, I worked my way down to Homestead to spend the entire day (Monday) looking for some of the wish list items. The first stop was Botanics Wholesale where I was able to select the palms for the Palm Circle area (criteria is 10 palms, solitary, graceful pinnate foliage, even heights, and maximum height not to exceed 60') of my short list of possible palms Botanics Wholesale was able to locate Carpenteria acuminata. Look at these beautiful palms!









Other stops in Miami / Homestead included Action Theory (for Mangrove, giant Fishtail Palms, and Bauhinia), Silver Krome (for Tacca and Anthirium) and Pine Island Nursery for rare fruit including trellised dragon fruit. Each of these trellises have 4 different cultivars of fruit - options include skin that is yellow, pink or red combined with an inside of black with white or pink.