From its iridescent orange or creamy-white birdlike flowers to its exotic, upright, foot-long leaves, bird-of-paradise is a remarkable and visually striking plant. Don’t let its eye-catching, alluring appearance mislead you: bird-of-paradise is not only simpler to grow than many other tropicals, but it’s also a fairly fast-growing plant easy to propagate.
It’s the banana’s cousin
The bird-of-paradise plant is related to the banana. Although there are five different species in its genus, Strelitzia, the most common are the orange-and-blue-flowered S. reginae and the white-flowered S. nicolai. Most species have dark-green, paddle-shaped leaves that are 18 to 24 inches wide and can grow to four feet in length. The much rarer and harder-to-find S. juncea has five-foot-long, reed-like stalks instead of leaves.
