Selected Horticultural Plants of the northern Yucatan, Mexico

Coral-vine, Corallita, Antigonon leptopus

Coral-vine or Corallita, Antigonon leptopus

In the dry season this member of the Buckwheat Family often clambers over fences and walls providing spectacular bursts of color. White-flowered forms are known. Though this plant is native to Mexico, thus often found wild in the countryside, it is grown throughout the world's tropics, as well as in the southern US and California.

Crinum, Crinum asiaticum

Crinum asiaticum

This huge member of the Amaryllis Family (not a lily), Crinum asiaticum grows in massive, chest-high clumps and if watered properly can flower through a long season. It's often found at old haciendas. An especially large form with broader, undulating leaves and even larger flowers is known as St.-John's-lily -- it's the variety sinicum.

Heliconia or Wild Plantain, Heliconia

In humid, tropical, lowland Mexico heliconias grow weedily in marshes and ditches but in the Yucatan they survive only where there's an uncommon supply of water, or someone waters them assiduously. Heliconias are members of the Banana Family, as their broad, glossy leaves indicate. Rarely, especially outside fancy hotels, you find similar Travelers-Trees, Ravenalas, with similar leaves, except that the leaves are arranged in a single plane. Heliconia leaves arise haphazardly, as at the right.

Hoja Santa, Piper auritum

Crush the large leaves of this plant and you'll never forget it, because of its very spicy odor. In many parts of lowland, tropical Mexico where this small tree grows wild, people wrap their tamales in Hoja Santa leaves before cooking them. The slender, white, pencil-like items are spikes of very tiny, very simple, very packed-together flowers. Note how the bases of the large leaves are lobed, or "cordate."

Madagascar Periwinkle, Vinca rosea

This erect, everblooming herb or subshrub growing one to two feet high is so common in some places that you might think it is a native wildflower. However, it grows throughout the tropics worldwide, as its name suggests. There's a white variety, too. The plant is very closely related to the purple-flowered periwinkles found so commonly in North America and Europe. Those periwinkles, however, are tailing and vinelike, and their corolla tubes are only about half as long as this species'.

Red Ginger, Alpinia purpurata

Sometimes called the Tropical Ginger or Polynesian Ginger, this is a member of the Ginger Family but it is not the Ginger from which the spice is made from its rhizome. Red Ginger is a native of the South Pacific islands. It forms a clump of leafy stems up to 15 feet tall. The red items in the picture are not flowers, but rather bracts (modified leaves) which shield the slim, tubular flowers. The Ginger Families includes hundreds of species and many are showy like this one.