A simple summertime vase of tropical flowers. Step back and it looks like bunches of bananas. Or, depending on your flight of fancy, a flock of parrots. This is a mason jar filled with Heliconia psittacorum, common name, Parrotflowers. A favorite perennial in tropical gardens, these can run rampant when in their happy place – at my house beside the front porch suits them perfectly.
A closer view of the Heliconias accented with their own foliage. I covered the rim of the mason jar with a band of varigated bromeliad foliage – channeling my mother “because it just looked tacky.”
That’s all from the doldrums of summer dog days in South Florida. To view more temperate vases follow this link to Cathy’s garden.
Happy Gardening!
The Shrub Queen 
Summer in Florida is very different from here. The cold snaps we have keep us from growing many truly tropical plants. It is so humid this morning, I can’t see out of our wet windows.
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Nice arrangement! We have lots of these here.
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Thank you. They are popular here.
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I usually squeegee the windows when that happens and can’t grow gingers like yours!
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Who needs dahlias when you have such fabulous tropical blooms to choose! I love the way you’ve used a strappy leaf to cover the top of the mason jar.
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Thank you – loved your dahlias!
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Only you amongst our regular IAVOMers could produce a vase like this, Amelia – and it looks wonderful!
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Indeed. I’m not sure these work as a houseplant.
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A vase of heliconias always wins a round of applause from me, I love them! 👏🏼 💖
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They remind me of you!
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🙂 💕
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You have the prettiest tropical flowers I’ve ever seen, Amelia! I’m not sure I have any flowers I think can hold their own alone in a vase.
https://krispgarden.blogspot.com/
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Thanks, Kris.
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Simple and elegant and in such pristine condition too with not a mark on that lovely shiny leaf! Hope you can stay cool and bear the heat… not long till the season changes again!
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Thanks, Cathy. I edited the foliage! Summer lasts until October here.
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Maybe you could take a holiday to somewhere cool in summer….? (The opposite of what people do here – they all go to Spain or Italy and bake on the beaches squashed up like sardines! 🤣)
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cruises in Alaska are popular getaways here in summer – though I hear its buggy.
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Perhaps an ocean cruise then… 😉
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I so love seeing what Florida provides – so different from up here N. of 40! I don’t know know how you handle that heat but your flowers are lovely!
https://zonethreegardenlife.blog/2024/07/29/in-a-vase-july-29th/
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thanks, air conditioning!!
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Kapow! I love how colorful and exciting this arrangement is.
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thank you.
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Yes, it does look like bananas, or more specifically, like Bananarama. You know, so do the flowers of some cultivars of Phormium tenax. Are you familiar with ‘Fire and Ice’? We got it here, even before my unidentified cultivar, but I am unimpressed. I refer to it as ‘Bad Santa’.
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It is different species.
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no, fire and ice is unfamiliar.
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I sort of think that you are not missing much.
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