The Plants of Costa Rica

 
One step into the Costa Rica Glasshouse, and you’re immediately immersed in a diversity of plant life, including avocado and guava trees, and many prominent heliconias and gingers. You’ll even find Theobroma cacao, the source of one of the world’s favorite delicacies – chocolate.

There are plants that grow on other plants, such as bromeliads. Some of these beautiful bromeliads bear only a single flower cluster in their lifetime but produce colorful, eye-catching foliage.

Orchid lovers will also be delighted by the diversity of blooms throughout the Costa Rica Glasshouse, including Cattleya skinneri, the national flower of Costa Rica. You’ll also see some of the tiniest orchids in the world, with flowers about the size of a pencil tip.

The true-to-life strangler fig tree serves as the icon of the Costa Rica Glasshouse. Famous for its “strangling” growth technique, a strangler fig thrives in the low-light of the rain forest by growing on top of another tree. The roots that sprout from the strangler fig twist their way down the host tree and into the ground. The strangler fig soon develops more prominent leaves than the host tree, gaining a monopoly on the rainforest’s limited sunlight. As the host tree is strangled, the strangler fig thrives, establishing its dominance in this fragile ecosystem.

Giant-leaved philodendrons, 50-foot vines, and stilt-rooted palms also reach for the sky, all contributing to the sense of exuberant life and growth in Costa Rica.

An array of fascinating plants, large and small, await discovery during your next visit to the Eleanor Armstrong Smith Glasshouse. 

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