Tropical gardens often attract butterflies, bees and hummingbirds too, and this makes the garden all the more enjoyable throughout the year. Tropical gardens can contain a wide variety of plants, but some require lots of heat while others require lots of water. Tropical gardens also don't often survive freezing temperatures either, so many people in cooler climates choose to create tropical container gardens which can be taken inside when bitter cold winter temperatures come around.

Most tropical plants require a lot of sunlight though, so if you're planting them into a ground based garden or raised garden bed, be sure to choose the sunniest spot you can find in your yard. You'll want to plant tropical plants and flowers in areas which get a minimum of six hours direct sunlight each day.

Some tropical garden plants such as bougainvillea, thrive on irregular watering patterns. The bougainvillea plant for example, is natural in areas of the world where there could be pouring rain for weeks, then months of dry spells. You can mimic these conditions when growing bougainvillea plants in your tropical garden by watering them really well for a week or two, then not watering them for at least a month. You'll find that these tropical plants seem to bloom best when they've been stressed, or kept dry for extended periods of time.

Bougainvillea plants can be grown in a variety of ways too. Most varieties will climb as a vine in the right conditions and with the right care, but these plants can also be shaped and pruned into small shrubs and bushes too. Bougainvillea plants have hook like thorns on them which can hurt if you're stabbed by them, but these thorns is what allow the plant to climb fences and trellises, and create a gorgeous display of color.

Bougainvillea tend to create tiny flowers which most people miss. The flowers are surrounded by paper thin bracts which bloom in a variety of bold, beautiful colors, and most people think these bracts are the actual flowers of the plant. The flowers themselves though, are tiny and located inside the bracts.

Esperanza and Spanish Broom are two more excellent plants to put into a tropical garden. These plants do quite well in really dry gardens too, because they're both heat and drought tolerant, which makes these beautiful plants quite hardy and tough. Despite their toughness though, both of these plants produce gorgeous, bright showy yellow flowers that bloom continuously from spring through fall.