Design Your Own Tropical Garden Paradise

As with any landscaping project, having a planting plan in place will ensure minimal effort and maximum success. Tropical landscapes tend to look overgrown — although in polite society we say, lush — with seemingly all of the plants vying for the most sunlight. In actuality, like all gardening schemes, tropical gardens follow a hierarchy so, in order to create a successful tropical garden, you’ll want to select plants from the following three categories — feature, filler and spiller.

Once you have your plan and have chosen your plants, a good idea is to arrange your plants before you start digging so that you make sure you’re happy with the layout. To give your plants the best start, make sure to add organic compost to the soil and dig it in well before planting. Once your plants are in place, water them in really well.

Feature plants will provide height to your garden, as well as acting as a canopy for the more shade-loving filler plants. They will also be the main focal points. Suitable feature plants include China Doll (Radermachera sinica), Australian Frangipani (Hymenosporum flavum), Jacaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia), and even our own Pohutukawa (Metrosideros excelsa).

Filler plants do exactly what it says on the label, fill in the spaces, so you’ll need more of these than you will feature plants. Here, you have a lot of choices but ideally you’ll want a mix of plants, some that showcase foliage, some that showcase flowers and some that showcase fragrance. Suitable plants include Gardenias (Gardenia radicans and Gardenia veitchii), Tropical Frangipani (Plumeria acutifolia), Vireyas, Hibiscus and Bromeliads.

Spiller plants are those that provide the finishing touch. In tropical planting schemes these are the climbers and ground cover plants. Suitable plants include Star Jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides), Stephanotis (Stephanotis floribunda), and Mandevila (Mandevilla boliviensis).

Clearly a tropical garden is not going to be possible in most parts of the country, but if you happen to live from Tauranga north, then you should be able to indulge your island fantasy. Tropical gardens have also been known to do well in the sunnier areas of Nelson and Blenheim but will require extra nurturing. Worth noting is that most, if not all, tropical plants don’t do well in frost-prone areas, so if you do experience frosts in the colder months, planting your more susceptible plants in pots for placing indoors or in a greenhouse over winter will ensure their survival, as will other forms of frost protection.

The reason tropical plants looks so vibrant and lush is because the areas where they occur naturally experience a lot of rainfall. What this means is that your tropical garden will require more water than most – especially during the summer months. An automated irrigation system is probably the best bet to ensure an adequate soil moisture level year-round. A layer of quality mulch will help to cut back on the amount of additional watering your need to do and has the added benefit of suppressing weeds as well.

Along with plenty of water, your tropical garden is going to need a good old-fashioned feed every now and again. Depending on the plants you choose, most will be happy with a relatively standard slow-release fertiliser such as Nitrophoska, while others — Vireyas and Hibiscus, for example — prefer something more acidic.