Gardening in the wet tropics is one of the great privileges of Australian horticulture — and one of its best kept secrets. While gardeners further south wrestle with frost, dry summers and the limited palette of a temperate climate, those of us in the wet tropics have access to a range of plants so extraordinary, so varied and so visually dramatic that the rest of the country can only admire them in botanical gardens and resort lobbies.

The plants collected here are the ones that make a tropical garden look genuinely designed. Not just lush — designed. There is a difference between a garden that has grown and a garden that has been composed, and the difference usually comes down to a handful of key plants chosen for their architecture, their colour combinations, their sense of occasion and their ability to make everything around them look better.

These are those plants.

The Lipstick Palm with its lacquered red crown shafts. Heliconia pendula ‘Red Waxy’ with its silver-powdery foliage massed against deep purple companions. The Maniltoa lenticellata unfurling its extraordinary new leaves like pale pink handkerchiefs above a garden bed. The Medinilla magnifica cascading from a shaded wall. The Starburst Clerodendrum erupting into flower in the depths of winter when the rest of the garden has taken a breath.

These are plants that resort designers and prestige landscapers reach for because they understand something that every serious tropical gardener eventually learns: in the wet tropics, you have the climate to grow things that money cannot buy elsewhere in Australia. The only question is which ones you choose.

We grow all of these at El Arish on the Cassowary Coast, where the conditions are as good as they get. Every plant in this collection is proven in the wet tropical climate and chosen because it delivers something genuinely special. Curated for Mission Beach Gardens.