8 Pro Tips for Incorporating Tropical Plants into Your Landscape Design

Florida is home to more than 4,700 species of plants. So go ahead, choose 20 to plant in your tropical garden. Then decide where to plant them. We’ll wait. 
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It’s OK to ask for help. 

What tips do the pros have for backyard tropical garden design? 
Use plants to soften hard edges. Spruce up your foundation plantings. Plant in layers. Try mass planting. Put plants in spots where they’ll thrive. Perk up your pool or pergola. Don’t forget maintenance. 

Keep reading for more about tropical plants for landscape design, including: 

How Do Plants Fit Into Your Residential Tropical Landscape Design?

Plant Your Tropical Garden in Layers 

Put Plants Where They’ll Thrive

Proper Plant Placement 

Be Choosy

Try Mass Planting

Include Lighting in Your Backyard Tropical Garden Design

Start Your Tropical Garden with Expert Design

The Final Step for Your Tropical Garden: Skilled, Dependable Maintenance

How Do Plants Fit into Your Residential Tropical Landscape Design?

So many ways. Do you have a few hours? No? Then we’ll just highlight a few ideas: 

• Tropical plants soften the hard edges of hardscape. Ground covers can snuggle up to patio edges. Planters packed with crotons break up big expanses of pavers. Drifts of flowering shrubs add softness to walkways. Climbing flowering vines like jasmine grow up the posts of your pergola, softening the lines and extending your tropical garden.
• Tropical plants turn your pool into a destination, offering luxurious vacation resort vibes. Add palm trees, colorful tropical flowers, big cool plants like split leaf philodendrons. Toss in a tiki hut bar and there’s no reason to leave.
• Surround your fountain with lush tropical plants and suddenly it’s a standout focal point.
• Spruce up your foundation. Tropical plants for landscape design planted along the front of your house offer great curb appeal, soften your home’s hard edges and call attention to its best features. They’re a bright, leafy connection between your house and the surrounding landscape.

Now that you know you need them, check out some more pro tips for incorporating tropical plants into your Sarasota residential tropical landscape design:

1. Plant Your Tropical Garden in Layers 

The secret to a lush, bountiful tropical garden bed is planting in tiers — not just lining up plants in one long row. Don’t be boring. 

Arrange plants with the tallest in back, medium in the middle and shorter plants in front.

Use a variety of plants with different heights, colors, shapes and textures. Include plants with intriguing foliage so you’re not just depending on flowers, that often only bloom for a few weeks. Great foliage plants look impressive in your tropical garden all the time. Crotons are great for this. So is Copperleaf ‘Louisiana Red.’

2. Put Plants Where They’ll Thrive

This is huge. Placing plants in the wrong spot is probably the biggest mistake we see.

Check the tags that come with your plants. If a plant needs sun and well-drained soil, please plant accordingly. If you really want a 5-bedroom home with plenty of natural light in Sarasota, would you be happy in a studio apartment in Manhattan with a view of a brick wall? 

Better yet, leave the planting to us, and know your flowery friends will love where they live. 

3. Speaking of Proper Placement…

Ponder a few more placement tips:

• Spacing is important for your backyard tropical garden design. If you space plants too close together, they’ll struggle, and end up too crowded as they grow. Space them too far apart and you’ll have big ugly gaps. Plant tags will tell you the proper spacing, which allows room for when the plants get bigger.
• Be sure to keep a path wide enough for walking between your foundation plants and your house. Plants shouldn’t touch the house. You need to access behind the plants for maintenance. Or a great place to hide when it’s time to clean the bathroom.
• Keep 12 inches of space between your lawn and plants to protect your plants from getting hit by the mower.

4. Be Choosy

Yes, there are thousands of plants to choose from here in South Florida, but sorry — you can’t have everything. That just creates landscape chaos.

 Choose 20 plants, not 200. Can’t decide? That’s why we’re here. 

Try four of our favorite go-to tropical plants for landscape design:

Liriope ‘Super Blue’

Known for having the showiest blooms of all the liriope, this beauty adds amazing bluish-purple color in mass plantings. You’ll want a slew of these

Bougainvillea

Everybody loves bougainvillea, a tropical vine-like shrub that comes in various shades in pink, red, orange, yellow, white, or purple. 

This shrub not only blooms in a spectacular show all year but is also drought tolerant. The more sun your bougainvillea gets, the more blooms it will put out, so plant accordingly.

Hibiscus

This is a favorite of ours for good reason. Hibiscus makes your yard feel like a vacation paradise, even when the most exotic thing happening out there is you grilling pineapple shrimp. 

Hibiscus flowers will wow you with a diameter of up to nearly 10 inches at maturity and come in a wide range of colors, from white to red, pink, yellow, and orange.
Bonus points: here in sunny South Florida it offers nearly year-round flowers. 

Dombeya ‘Seminole’

This beauty is also called Florida hydrangea or tropical hydrangea because the flowers resemble classic hydrangeas. This showy shrub blooms to impress with vivid rosy pink flowers from fall to spring. Pollinators love it, too. 

5. Try Mass Planting

You’ll love it. It works just like it sounds — instead of two or three pink muhly grass or blue daze, you plant 20. Or more. It’s a big way to create impressive impact. 

Bonus: it’s easier to maintain than taking care of a planting bed with a bunch of different plants. They all have the same needs.

6. Include Lighting in Your Backyard Tropical Garden Design

If you’ve hung out with us here before, you know the importance of landscape lighting. But a great idea is worth repeating:

Landscape lighting in your tropical garden extends your enjoyable time outdoors. That means more time to stroll your garden paths, lounge on your patio, splash in the pool. You’ll appreciate those stunning tropical plants in a whole new magical light. 

It’s important to plan for lighting now even if you don’t have it installed until later. 

We’ll install sleeves underground now so they’ll be ready to accommodate the wiring later. No digging underneath your pavers like hungry moles.

7. Start Your Tropical Garden with Expert Design

A lot of factors go into creating a great residential tropical landscape design. 

 A good designer will help you kick things off by asking you a ton of questions, from what colors you love to what pets share your yard.

Pros know the best tropical plants for Florida landscapes, including exactly what plants thrive here in Sarasota. 

8. The Final Step for Your Tropical Garden: Skilled, Dependable Maintenance

Everything looks great out there! Until, suddenly, it doesn’t. 

Make sure you hire landscape design services in Sarasota FL that don’t just design and dash but offer a comprehensive maintenance plan to keep everything healthy and thriving. 

Your tropical garden needs fertilizing, pruning, targeted irrigation, turf care, help handling plant pests and diseases. Hire one experienced landscaping company that can expertly handle all your needs. Less worry, more relaxing.

Ready for Expert Backyard Tropical Garden Design? Talk to Us

It’s no easy feat to create a vibrant, interesting array of plants in your tropical garden. What if you pick the wrong plants? Or plant them too close together? Or choose plants that don’t like the conditions in your yard? What if they all die? This is getting waaay too stressful! 

Leave it all to us. 

Tropical Gardens offers expert landscape design services in Sarasota FL to create a backyard tropical paradise that will make you want to spend every spare minute outside. 

You go relax in your tiki hut and leave the design and planting to us. Wait — you don’t have a tiki hut? Let us fix that, too. 

We can’t wait to get started. 

Give us a call or fill out our form today! Our team of Sarasota landscape experts can’t wait to help you out with all your tropical garden design needs, stress free.