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Published
Friday, July 2, 2021
 By Victoria Torley Let’s see here, what were we doing? Ah, yes, you had just moved into your new house in the middle of a boring piece of grassland previously reserved for cattle. Now you want to spruce things up a bit by putting in native plants. Last week, it was trees so let’s try shrubs. When you talk about shrubs in Costa Rica, you need to understand that shrubs in the tropics can get tall. A Costa Rican shrub can grow to tree size. The Plumeria rubra, or temple tree (that should be a clue about height) is classed as a shrub but can be nearly fifty feet tall. Trimming to shrub size is a great idea. Sadly, it is attractive to leaf-cutter ants, so you may want to give it a pass. In the more ‘shrub-sized shrubs,’ you can start with the Justicia aurea, or golden crown. The flowers look a bit like a fireworks explosion. The shrub is easily tamed and needs to be or it can get twenty feet tall. At that height, it makes a wonderful barrier between your home and the neighbor you don’t want to see. My golden crown has been in place for six years and it only about eight feet tall, so it’s a slow grower. A cousin of the golden crown, Justicia tinctoria, azul de mata, is a ‘true’ shrub to about seven feet but often trimmed into a thick hedge. The ‘azul’ in the name might make you think of blue flowers but they are actually red and yellow. The shrub owes its name to the leaves, which, when soaked in hot water then added to laundry, act as a bluing agent, whitening your clothes. Back to taller shrubs, and we have the Dahlia imperialis, the dahlia tree, and the Tithonia diversifolia, or tree marigold. Both can grow to ten to thirteen feet, the first with purple flowers, the second with gold flowers. Again, both make a nice barrier planting because of their thick growth and look wonderful planted along that road in front of your house. If you want something even smaller, the Bouvardia glabra, from the jasmine genus, will grow to about four feet and produce white flowers for most of the year. If that is still tall for your landscape, try the Randia loniceroides, called the ‘natural bonsai’ for its stature, about three feet tall. This is an attractive plant with a tiered branch pattern and small leaves. It produces white flowers from April to June. It is, however, difficult to cultivate, so don’t plant it unless you can tend to it. It is best grown in planters. More next week. Mystery Plant for
the Week
 This one is from my trip to Armenia. Great color! -------------------------- Editor's note: More information on this article or about gardening, Ms. Victoria Torley, gardener columnist, can be reached at victoriatorley1@gmail.com  Real Estate For Sale
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