Plants grown for Miami conditions

1. How much direct sun does the spot get?

This is the single most useful number, and people consistently over-estimate it. Look at the bed at 9am, midday and 4pm on a clear day and count actual direct sun. Six or more hours opens up the full flowering palette — ixora, thryallis, plumbago, bougainvillea, croton. Below about four hours, flowering shrubs will grow perfectly well and simply refuse to bloom, and the better strategy is foliage colour instead: variegated arboricola, ti plant, wild coffee, ferns.

2. What happens to the ground after heavy rain?

Walk the area an hour after a summer storm. Water standing for more than a few hours means the site is genuinely wet, and that narrows the palette to species that tolerate periodic saturation — cocoplum above all. Trying to grow drought-adapted plants in a wet pocket produces a slow decline that looks like underwatering and gets treated with more water.

StockWhat is ready changes through the year

3. How big can it get?

Growth rates here are much faster than most plant labels assume. A clusia sold at eighteen inches becomes a twelve-foot shrub; a philodendron in a nursery pot becomes eight feet across. Check mature size before anything else, and where a plant is right in every respect except scale, there is usually a dwarf cultivar bred for exactly that problem.

Container sizes and what they mean

You are essentially choosing between paying with money or paying with time. Both routes end in the same place. For groundcover and fast shrubs, buy small — they fill in within a season. For trees and screening where you want height now, larger stock is usually worth it.