The areca palm, also known as the butterfly and golden cane palm is the most popular grown indoors from the dypsis genus, and easy to grow. Multiple cane like stems grow from the root system and produce attractive arching fronds, with quite narrow leaflets. The areca is known as a cane type palm because of the bamboo cane looking stems once it's matured. They're also very similar to the feather types (especially the kentia palm) that display similar leaflets (leaves) and grows up to about the same height indoors.
Most people find growing and maintaining this undemanding plant easy enough. One of the worst things a grower can do is overwater and allow water to stagnate near the root system, otherwise they're a real pleasure to grow. All plants clean air borne toxins for us to breath in healthier oxygen, but palms (including the dypsis lutescens) was named as one of the best air purifying plants, after a scientific clean air study was completed by Wolverton and Nasa.
Clusia lends both an exotic and classy look to our Florida tropical landscape. The leaves are thick with a leathery texture, are rather large at 4-6” and teardrop-shaped. Clusia, once established, are both drought and salt tolerant making them a natural choice for our island environment.
While this plant is low-maintenance and trouble-free, they do branch out close to the ground and can get very wide. They make excellent privacy hedges as well as large accent plants for the landscape. The Rosea is the native variety and has pinkish-white flowers that appear in the summer, usually at night, that might last through the morning on cloudy days.
Clusia are evergreen shrubs that will grow in full sun to partial shade. They are moderately fast growers. For a classic yet exotic hedge or specimen tree, the Clusia is a very good choice.
Podocarpus
Regular price
$45.00
Handsome and hardy, podocarpus is the ultimate in a low-maintenance shrub for sun or shade. The soft, fine-textured foliage is great-looking when sheared as a formal hedge or left to grow more naturally as a large accent with minimal trimming required. Because of its moderate growth rate it won't work as a hedge-in-a-hurry. But given enough time these shrubs become thick, luxurious, full to the ground - and large enough to work as hedge bushes, privacy screens, or plants to camouflage unsightly things around the house. You can grow this shrub as a tree, if you wish - it will form a large oval shape and lower branches can be trimmed up or left on.
You can keep this shrub clipped without taking it down to the bare minimum of foliage...especially if you've planned ahead for the size of a mature plant. Because it takes shaping so well, this plant will fit in a narrow-depth area and can even be trained as a topiary specimen.
This is a moderate grower you can keep 5 to 7 feet or let it get larger - quite a bit, in fact, since the plant can grow as much as 40 feet tall. It's evergreen, salt-tolerant, and cold tolerant, so it does well in any area of South Florida. Sun or shade is just fine, though in shade these plants will grow more slowly. However, the color will look deeper and richer in a shadier spot than in a sunny one.
