The Complete Tropical Landscaping Guide
Want to feel like you’re in a villa in Hawaii or even Bali every time you walk into your backyard? Then get yourself a tropical garden!
Tropical gardens bring a refreshing, invigorating vibe with their lush vegetation and vibrant colors. Done properly, you’ll feel like you’re walking into a tropical forest with cool, fresh air.
For those looking to create their own mini tropical forest, this article will teach you exactly how.
1. Tropical Landscaping Pros & Cons
It’s great to live in the tropics and sip on mojitos every day, but there are some cons to this gardening style which you should be aware of before implementing it.
Pros
First, let’s go over why people actually want tropical landscapes
- Exotic Look: Tropical gardens feel exotic, almost like you’re in a resort or villa. This is not only a unique aesthetic, but also means they’re great places to host fun events like parties.
- Cooling Function: Tropical forests often feel cooling and refreshing, and for good reason. Their plants usually have large leaves, which provide shade from the sun. Furthermore, with larger foliage, they can photosynthesize at a quicker rate, reducing carbon dioxide, a gas that traps heat, thus cooling down your home even more.
- Air Purification: With their larger foliage, tropical plants are better at not only reducing carbon dioxide and increasing oxygen levels, but also filtering pollutants and dust from the air.
Cons
Usually, people don’t give too much thought to the practical benefits and focus more on the look of landscapes when they’re choosing the style they want, so ultimately, you’re probably choosing tropical gardens for their aesthetic.
That’s perfectly fine, but before that, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into.
- Higher Water Requirements: The tropics are humid and normally have more frequent and higher levels of rainfall. This shapes tropical plants to be used to these environments, resulting in these plants now requiring frequent and more water to survive.
- Frequent Fertilization: Fertilization needs to be applied more often than with normal plants as tropical plants grow quickly and have adapted to need additional nutrients frequently.
- Winter Protection: In the tropics, there is no winter, which means the plants have no way of preparing or protecting against the cold. As such, additional work is required to protect your plants, eg cold frames, frost cloths, mulch, and grow lights.
- Space Requirements: Besides the larger foliage, to successfully create a tropical garden, you’ll need large trees like palm trees and banana trees. If you try to make do with a smaller space, chances are, your tropical landscape is going to look quite lackluster, so you will need a larger space for a tropical garden.
2. Choosing The Plants
For the plants, you’re basically incorporating tropical plants. Here are some commonly used ones.
Trees
One of the, if not the most important elements in a tropical garden, choose the wrong trees, or worse, don’t use any, and you’ll have yourself a really weird-looking landscape that looks nothing like a tropical garden.
As mentioned earlier, palm trees and banana trees are among the most popular tropical trees. Just simply adding palm trees will be enough to give any landscape a strong tropical feel. That’s how symbolic of the tropics palm trees are.
Shrubs
The next most important element has got to be the shrubs. The most defining element of tropical landscapes is large foliage. Along with trees, your shrubs are key to filling your tropical garden with large leaves.
For this, the two best plants for the job are the Bird Of Paradise and Crotons. The Bird Of Paradise has huge, green leaves, while Crotons have smaller, but still big leaves that are green and orangey-red.
Groundcover
While less prominent than shrubs and trees, your groundcovers should still help to fill your tropical garden with big leaves.
My favorite plant for this is the Hosta. Hostas’ leaves have a unique shape, as they look like literally bigger versions of small leaves. They retain that same round shape, unlike Crotons and the Bird Of Paradise which have slightly sharper, less rounded leaves. This makes hostas great for adding different textures and shapes to the foliage in your garden.
Another great choice for groundcover in tropical landscapes is Mondo Grass. Mondo grass has super sharp, long leaves, but they are densely packed, so it won’t look out of place among other fuller, bigger leaves. Like the Hosta, it’s great for adding a different texture and shape to your garden.
3. The Hardscapes
When it comes to tropical landscapes, you really need to cut back on the hardscapes.
Think about it. It wouldn’t feel like a tropical forest if there was a fire pit and a sculpture in the center as the focal piece would it?
Generally, you shouldn’t have too many hardscapes besides your paths, rocks, retaining walls, seating areas, and
water features. And even then, they shouldn’t take up more than 30-40% of your landscape in most cases.
Remember, you want to keep the focus on your plants.
For the paths, both modern and traditional designs can fit in quite nicely, so just go with the material you prefer.
For the water features, you want features that fit in a tropical forest, i.e. ponds and waterfalls. Fountains can work too as they help reinforce the resort and villa feel.
Water features also increase the humidity of your landscape, which is beneficial for your tropical plants that are used to extremely humid environments.
4. Maintenance
Maintaining a tropical garden takes more work than many other styles, but it has to be done if you want to enjoy the rewards.
Here are things to note for the various aspects of maintenance.
Watering
Given that these are tropical plants used to frequent heavy rainfall, you’ll have to give them lots of water to recreate that.
To reduce the burden on yourself, it’s strongly encouraged that you install an irrigation system, which also has the added benefit of conserving water by estimating your plants’ water needs more precisely.
It goes without saying that you don’t want to rack up expensive water bills, so it’s also a good idea to harvest rainwater for use. The easiest way is to just use a bucket, but you can also set up more sophisticated systems that collect rainwater and can be connected to your irrigation system.
You should also apply mulch to retain moisture in the soil so that you don’t have to water as much.
Fertilizing
Fertilizing is another tedious task, as tropical plants need fertilizer more often than normal plants do.
This can’t be avoided, so just make sure not to overdo it. Fertilize more frequently, but not more at once.
Follow the recommended dosages, and don’t get lazy and use more at once so that you don’t have to apply as frequently. If you apply too much fertilizer at once, it’ll have the opposite effect and you’ll actually end up damaging your plants.
Pruning And Trimming
With plants taking up a larger part of your landscape, there will be more pruning and trimming to be done.
Make sure not to skip this though, because if you start letting the dead or damaged parts pile up, not only will your plant health be affected, but it will completely ruin the lush, vibrant look that’s characteristic of tropical landscapes, defeating the purpose of you even implementing it in the first place.
Winter Protection
Unlike most other gardening styles where you can use plants that are more resilient to winter, you don’t have a choice with tropical gardens. After all, if you’re not using tropical plants, how can you call it a tropical garden?
As such, you will simply have to take steps to prevent your plants from dying during the winter. We already mentioned these steps earlier, but we’ll go into more detail here.
Unless you want to grow your plants in a greenhouse, your plants will have to be out in the open, so the only way to protect them is with frost cloths and cold frames, which are essentially mini greenhouses.
You’ll also need to apply a thick layer of mulch to trap warmth in the soil.
On top of that, your plants will receive less sunlight, which again, is not something tropical plants have to deal with. So be prepared to also use grow lights if you see your plants start to deteriorate.
Conclusion
By now, you should have a good idea of the good and the bad of tropical landscapes, how to implement them, and how to take care of them.
One last thing to note is that tropical landscapes inevitably require more water and fertilizer. Besides water conservation and efficient irrigation, you may want to take additional steps to counter your environmental impact.
One surefire way to make a difference is to use environmentally friendly materials for your hardscapes. For your paths, opt for eco-friendly composites. And for your other hardscapes, go for options like recycled wood or materials that require less processing, like stone.
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