Book Review: Keeping Tropical Romance Alive, Minus The Tropics

Marianne Willburn’s latest book is about much, much more than just tropical plants.

This is a book about how these marvelous lovers of heat and humidity can be overwintered, stored, propagated, and integrated into our temperate gardens. And yes, sometimes sadly, it is a book about loss — and parting with a plant that doesn’t fit in the scheme of things, for one reason or another.

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune of joining a small group of garden writers to hear Willburn talk about her book, “Tropical Plants and How to Love Them” — published last May by Cool Springs Press — her gardens and her love of tropicals, as well as her respect for boundaries, like not keeping too many dormant plants in the garage, which she shares with her husband.

It was a eureka experience and her book, which is perfect for East End gardeners, is just what you need to give you the confidence to explore beyond everyday annuals and perennials.

But first, let’s get some historical perspective. In the 1970s, the age of plastics had a profound effect on gardening and horticulture. Houseplants had always lived in our homes, but the selection was very limited — sold in very heavy, breakable clay pots. Suddenly, plastic pots served the same purpose, at a fraction of the cost and even smaller fraction of the weight.

At the same time, plastics were being introduced for use as greenhouse covers and films, replacing the traditional heavy and costly glass. Put up a simple steel tube frame, add two layers of plastic, zip the layers together to form an envelope, fill the envelope with slightly pressurized air and, voila, you had an inexpensive greenhouse that was relatively cheap to heat and maintain.

Add a third revolution that we call “soilless” potting mixes. Instead of using heavy dirt for potting soils, peat moss was mixed with sand, perlite and vermiculite, making potting soils incredibly light. So now, we had large potted plants in light soils that allowed them to be shipped from places like Florida, as well as closer to home on Long Island.

This sparked the houseplant revolution and craze of the mid 1970s. In Manhattan, a store called Terrestris opened on a rooftop, where you could now buy an 8-foot-tall palm, dracaena, or rubber plant and carry it home, or have it delivered. Just about every village Main Street had a plant store — and not just garden centers, but even tropical plant shops that sold dozens of varieties. They popped up in East Hampton and Southampton, and a greenhouse was added to the supermarket in the middle of downtown Hampton Bays. Houseplant stores were everywhere.

As growers sought to increase the varieties and types of houseplants they offered, more and more tropical plants began to show up in homes on patios, decks, and hanging baskets throughout the Hamptons. And it was only a matter of short time before our talented East End landscape architects began to sneak these tropicals into the fabulous gardens that we all know so well. But what happened to the gorgeous, but very cold-sensitive, plants at the end of the season?

The well-heeled would have these plants dug, potted and brought to local greenhouses that would, for a very sizable fee, overwinter them. Even the larger, potted birds-of-paradise, palms and ficus in their beautiful terracotta pots weighing hundreds of pounds would be picked up with tractors, put into large trucks and transported to the large commercial greenhouses for their winter “vacation.”

It wasn’t long, though, before the rest of us gardeners began to dabble with tropicals in our beds and borders. They added new dimensions of color, texture and size not found in collections of annuals and perennials. But come the end of the gardening season, most got trashed or composted.

Willburn faced this same predicament. What gets saved, how do you save it and how do you part with the plants you can’t overwinter? Some of these tropical plants get integrated into our gardens, some spend the summer in pots, but you can easily get attached to them — and replacing these plants every single year can get expensive.

Living on a property in rural northern Virginia — an area known for its hot and humid summers, but in a hardiness zone similar to ours — Willburn considers the same issues we do when deciding what gets saved and what gets tossed on the compost pile.

She reminds us that most, if not all, of these tropicals can be put in a winter hibernation where they are kept cool, alive, but not really growing. Many of her plants overwinter in trays on racks in her garage, where there is an ongoing territorial truce with her husband on space allocation. Other plants find homes in her house, a few go into her small greenhouse and a few into cold frames. She’s experimented and made all the mistakes, learned from them, and now shares her experiences, making our efforts much easier and predictable.

The book is divided into three major sections, starting with The Relationship, which includes several pages covering, “The Summer Romance: Sexy, Exciting, Fleeting” — and if the title alone doesn’t want to make you read on, the pictures are simply delicious and result in … more reading.

Next, she covers The Design and The Plants, where she goes into dirt-deep detail on over 30 varieties, from aglaonema to zingiberaceae. The photos throughout the book are not just helpful, but also inspiring, and instill passion and intrigue of working with plants that, just a half century ago, gardeners needed to keep in a greenhouse.

She covers other plants in less detail and it was in this section that I found one of my all-time favorites: Strobilanthes, or the Persian shield. About 45 years ago, I was growing this plant in the greenhouse at Southampton College when it was relatively unknown — and I would have never, ever thought of taking this plant outdoors. Now, not only can you find this tropical in many gardens and containers, but Willburn tells us how simple it is to take easily rooted cuttings, pot them up and keep them indoors for next year’s gardens. Grow, repeat, enjoy. Her instructions, intuition and experience give the reader comfort, while still realizing there are challenges, though not insurmountable.

An accomplished gardener and gardening columnist, Willburn writes with a smooth and flowing style, and delves into this subset of gardening: Growing tropical plants where it’s only tropical for 90 days. Few of us like to throw plants away, but in this pursuit, having the heart to say goodbye to some at the end of the season is really necessary. You can grow some pretty amazing tropical plants, but some will get bugs, many will be challenging, but oh, what fun.

Willburn also points out the need for cold frames, which is a garden structure and tool that I, myself, have urged readers to employ for decades. In several parts of the book, she explains how many of these tropicals can be cold frame candidates for winter storage and, for those that need a bit more warmth, there’s copious detail on how to overwinter, take cuttings, store roots and tender bulbs.

The book does jump around a bit, but it’s easy to understand that it may have been written almost as a stream of consciousness that, clearly, could be difficult to organize. How do you pull all this great information together? How do you give a gardener a sense of control over these plants that may not want to be controlled? What do you keep, what do you part with and what can you make more of?

I loved the chapter headings, like “Relationship Fatigue, It’s So Over,” as they are entirely appropriate and easy to relate to as fellow gardeners. She starts the book with a critical statement: “Very few garden books come with an exit strategy. This one does.” And how very true that is. You can’t grow it all. We need to adapt as much as we want our plants to adapt.

This book is a great read for spring, or on the beach in the summer — full of inspiration and ideas that get gardeners juiced up. It will help you gain confidence while taking a walk on the wilder side. Just remember, there’s always room for one more, but there may not be room for everything.

Keep growing.