Costus comosus 5 plant bulk buy

Few plants in the tropical garden earn their keep as consistently as Costus barbatus. Where most gingers save their performance for a season, this one flowers year-round — sending up tall, torch-like spikes of deep red bracts from both the stem tips and the base simultaneously, each one studded with bright yellow flowers that appear in succession for weeks at a time. It is, by any measure, one of the most generous flowering plants you can put in a warm-climate garden.

The slightly fuzzy, spiralling foliage is handsome in its own right — lush and architectural, building into full, graceful clumps that fill space beautifully without ever looking untidy. Use it as a bold garden filler, mass it for a dramatic mid-border planting, or let a single established clump anchor a shaded corner. It tolerates a degree of cold better than many costus, making it a reasonable choice for gardeners at the warmer end of the subtropics.

The yellow flowers are edible — sweet, mildly flavoured and entirely at home scattered through a salad or used as a garnish. It’s a genuine dual-purpose plant: ornamental enough for a designer tropical garden, useful enough for the kitchen garden or edible landscape.

Cut stems hold well, making this one of the better costus for the vase — the red bracts are long-lasting and the flowers continue to open after cutting, which is precisely what you want in a cut flower.

Nectar feeders find it reliably, and given that it flowers without a break through the year, it provides consistent forage when other plants are between flushes.