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These plants, officially called epiphytes, drip from the crooks of trees all over the islands. The long, thin leaves sprout from a center that looks slightly like that of a pineapple. Air plants get their sustenance from decomposing leaf matter caught in their leaves and moisture from the air.

This lush green plant carries a yellow trumpet-shaped flower, leading to its other name, golden trumpet. The leaves are thick, smooth, and pointy and its milky sap is poisonous. Popular with landscapers and home gardeners, the plant usually grows in vines or hedges.

This unusual flower is one of the islands’ loveliest. Its waxy, heart-shaped flower comes in shades of pink, white, or red. A tapered shoot protrudes from the center. While anthurium grow in the wild, you can buy them as cut flowers from stalls by the roadside.

In colors that range from basic magenta to every spectrum of the red, orange, and white family, this Caribbean staple decorates yards and gardens across the islands. The plants can grow to an enormous size, but most serve as hedges.

These exotic and flamboyant flowers look like bright red or orange birds sitting on deep green leaves. You’ll find them mainly in well-tended gardens, but in some moist places, they grow in the wild.

The workhorse of Caribbean gardens and roadsides, this shrub bears flowers in myriad hues. Red is the most common, but there are literally thousands of varieties with single, double, and even triple blooms. Picked blooms stay open all day.

When night falls during the summer months, the waxy white flowers of this cactus-like plant give off an exquisite sweet aroma. The large, showy flowers are simply lovely to watch as they open at dusk. After they close the next morning, the flowers develop into tasty fruits.

Gardeners all over the islands usually prune the pink- or white-flowered oleander into rows as a hedge. The wood is poisonous to animals so folks often plant them near more fragile plants to keep foraging goats and donkeys away.

Most of the year, spider lilies look like rather pedestrian green-leafed plants growing along the roadside, but summer sees them burst into bloom all over the islands with a shower of white flowers. If you are very patient, you can watch them open at dusk. The lilies last only a few days before drying up.

With large, rounded scarlet blooms made up of individual flowers and set on green leaves, ixora looks somewhat like a geranium. This year-round bloomer is popular with home gardeners and landscapers who use it as a hedge.