Tropical Plant Conference, Ft. Lauderdale

We took in the TPIE (Tropical Plant Conference) in Ft. Lauderdale this week. It's where lots of new plants are introduced to the retail nurseries. New products, hot new plants and what's for sale this year. For example, last year when I attended this conference, the exciting new plant was the introduction of the blue orchids.

This time, the same company introduced two new colors, lavender and maroon along with a deeper blue. You can see these, below. At the beginning of the year no one knew much about these, but by fall of 2011, you could find blue orchids in Home Depot and lots of other stores. I assume these new colors will be available in the same places. They are, however, not naturally colored. They are white orchids that have had color injected into the base, so when the re-bloom, they will be white or near white.

New orchid colors for this year.

Rachael Hopkins, from Hopkins Nursery won best of 10 x 10 nursery displays.

Hopkins Nursery, a wholesale nursery, is a place I've written about before as I try to visit just about every time I get to Florida. They're growers of things like allspice, cinnamon, bay rum and similar rare and hard to find plants. To see what they grow, here's their website.

Notice, it's a plant watering container, but also a sprayer at the top.

I thought this was a good new product this year. It's a container for watering plants and also has a mister on top for plants that need more humidity.

Medillina Magnifica

One of the winners of the cool new plant category was this Medillina Magnifica - sorry, there's no common name. It stays in bloom form 4-6 months, is tough with long clusters of bright flowers and large buds (which are about the size of an orange, the flowers hang down about 15 inches or more).

I liked the garden feet planters - they're almost 30 inches long and come in 6 colors. And this little planter, below of a bromeliad and a cat in a basket.

Bromeliad in bloom with "cat."

While this looks like a real cat in a basket, it's not. The basket is about 1 1/2 inches across, the bromeliad that's in bloom is only about the size of 2 postage stamps and the cat is made of rabbit fur. Still, it's one of those too-cute items there will probably be a market for.

That's the news from South Florida. Wish you could all be here and smell the flowers!