Sprucing up your tropicals!
Author: Janne Nilsson Date Posted:10 February 2016
Hopefully you have been getting some good flowers in your tropical garden during these past summer months. At Bamboo Land, we have had quite a warm summer with decent rainfall, so growth has been good with plenty of flowering gingers and heliconias throughout the gardens. Coming into Autumn, however, there are now quite a lot of old spent flowers, and stems that are starting to brown off all over the place. Its now a good time to start removing some of these old scrappy looking stems, and make room for the new emerging growth that should be coming through.
This is a photo of a very neglected Bihai caribaea 'Black Magic', which in this photo is not looking so 'magic'. After a long season of fantastic flowering, the great big flowers are now spent, and the older stems are starting to brown off.
A quick 5 minuter job later, and the same plant is once again looking nice and tidy. The old stems have been removed by cutting them off at ground level. This is best done with a serrated bread knife, or pruning saw. The stems that are left, and the stems that will flower next season.