Northern Tropicals

Northern Tropicals Northern Tropicals is the leading supplier of cold hardy tropical plants and palms in the Midwest. Enjoy breathtaking tropicalesque scenery in your backyard!

06/14/2026

The 2023 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map showed something zone pushers have been noticing for years: about half of the country shifted to the next warmer half-zone compared to the 2012 map — roughly 2.5°F warmer on average across the contiguous US.

That's not permission to skip winter protection — cold winters still happen and will keep happening. But it does mean some species that were firmly out of reach twenty years ago are worth experimenting with today. The line of what's possible keeps moving for people who are paying attention.

06/12/2026

The assumption most people make is that cold is what kills palms in winter. Cold is a factor — but frozen ground is often the real mechanism. When the soil around a palm's roots freezes solid, it can no longer release moisture into the rootball. A palm can slowly dehydrate inside a perfectly built protection box.

The fix: soil heating cables that keep the root zone from freezing solid, and a small amount of water — about a gallon every two weeks — poured directly into the protection setup. Not to push growth. Just to keep the plant from dying of thirst while it sleeps.

06/10/2026

I've had a windmill palm in the same container since 2021 — no pot size increase, greenhouse through winter, outdoors in summer. Essentially bonsai treatment. It doesn't thrive. It doesn't die either. It just waits.

There's something in that. A windmill palm can tolerate the wrong conditions for years at a time — cramped roots, limited light, dry greenhouse air — and still come back when things improve. The patience they have is part of why they survive zone 5 winters. They're built to wait.

06/09/2026

I visited Eberts Greenhouse in Ixonia, WI a few weeks ago — a well-stocked place with a lot of variety. But the palm section told a familiar story: more than thirty palms on display, and almost every one of them was a majesty palm. Two Christmas palms near the entrance had browning fronds and visible spider mites.

This isn't a knock on any single nursery. It's the pattern everywhere in the north. Northern growers keep getting sold plants that can't survive a northern winter. No wonder people decide they're not cut out for palms — they were given the wrong plant from the start.

06/07/2026

Before you buy insulation foam or build a wood frame, add one piece of gear to your list: a Thermocube. It's a temperature-activated outlet — plugs in between your heater and the wall, powers the heater only when temps drop to 35°F, cuts off at 45°F. Around $20. Most zone pushers run their overwinter heaters on a timer or just leave them plugged in constantly — both waste electricity and shorten heater life significantly.

The Thermocube is what makes a passive box into a responsive system. It's the single cheapest improvement you can make to any protection setup.

I had a hardy tapioca — Manihot grahamii — in my yard for eleven years. Every fall: dig it up, saw the root ball down sm...
06/05/2026

I had a hardy tapioca — Manihot grahamii — in my yard for eleven years. Every fall: dig it up, saw the root ball down small enough to fit a 15-gallon pot, cut all the leaves off, and move it to the greenhouse. Every spring: plant it back out, watch it grow to eight or ten feet by August. The ritual worked for over a decade, but eventually the repeated root pruning caught up with it. Last fall it didn't look right. I let it go.

Good news: Manihot grahamii produces seed pods that explode when they ripen — seeds scatter into the mulch on their own. A seedling volunteered last fall. I potted it for winter, planted it out this spring. Second generation, carrying on from 2014. The plant planned its own succession.

06/03/2026

The windmill palm is the only cold-hardy palm with a natural coat of fiber wrapping its trunk — the accumulated remains of old leaf bases that stay in place rather than dropping off cleanly. It looks rough and unruly, but it's doing something: that dense fiber insulates the trunk's vascular tissue and the growing point from rapid temperature swings.

Most palm species lack this structure entirely. It's one of the reasons Trachycarpus fortunei can handle what zone 5 throws at it when other species can't. Evolution built in the protection.

A rice paper plant — Tetrapanax papyrifer — is rated zone 7 at the very least. Mine survived an outdoor low of around -1...
06/02/2026

A rice paper plant — Tetrapanax papyrifer — is rated zone 7 at the very least. Mine survived an outdoor low of around -15°F this past winter with a single strand of 25 Christmas lights laid flat on the ground inside an insulated wood frame. I boxed it around Thanksgiving, dropped the lights in, and forgot about it entirely. Didn't check once until March.
Come spring: alive. Better than alive — a pup had pushed up from the rhizome a foot away from the main plant. Sometimes the most surprising result is the one you almost didn't try for.

Most cold-climate gardeners spend a lot of money on protection hardware. The most underrated tool costs nothing: the sou...
05/30/2026

Most cold-climate gardeners spend a lot of money on protection hardware. The most underrated tool costs nothing: the south-facing wall of your house or garage. Brick, concrete, and stone absorb heat all day and release it slowly overnight — creating a thermal buffer of five to eight degrees right at the wall surface.
A palm planted within four feet of a south-facing masonry wall is in a meaningfully different microclimate than one sitting in the open yard. That margin can be the difference between alive and not. It’s the first thing to consider before building any kind of protection system.

When a palm comes out of winter, one thing tells you everything: the new growth spear at the center of the crown. Pull i...
05/29/2026

When a palm comes out of winter, one thing tells you everything: the new growth spear at the center of the crown. Pull it gently. If it’s firm and green, the palm made it. If it separates from the trunk with almost no resistance, you have bud rot — and the palm almost certainly won’t recover.
Everything else is secondary. Fronds can look completely dead and still leave a viable growing point below. But if the spear pulls clean, that’s your answer. Don’t let dead-looking fronds trick you into giving up too early, and don’t let a clean spring disguise the one thing that matters.

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