Costus comosus

Few plants in the tropical garden earn their keep as consistently as Costus comosus, formerly known 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.

Costus comosus is one of the best filler costus for tropical gardens, it looks spectacular massed and is a lot of bang for very little care.