Most lists of “Costa Rica’s iconic flowers” are really lists of tropical flowers. Hibiscus, bird of paradise, plumeria — beautiful, widely grown here, and native to Africa, Asia and South America respectively.
This is the other list. These are the flowers that are actually of this country, and the reasons they matter here are stranger and better than the photographs suggest.
The national flower was chosen by a competition
The guaria morada, Guarianthe skinneri, became Costa Rica’s national flower on 15 June 1939 — and the reason it happened at all is unusually human.
Argentina was assembling a garden of the national flowers of the Americas and wrote to ask Costa Rica for its own. Costa Rica did not have one. So the Garden Club and the Rotary Club held a competition to pick it, and the guaria morada won.
It is an orchid, and not the kind that sits in a pot of soil. It is an epiphyte — it grows on the bark of trees in mountain forest between roughly 700 and 1,400 metres, drawing nothing from the tree it sits on. It flowers between late winter and early summer, in shimmering pink-purple, and there is a white form too.
The name comes from the colour: morada, for the purplish-red of blackberries.
And here is the part that says something about the country. According to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the guaria morada has become less common in Costa Rican forests because of intensive collecting — while thriving as a cultivated plant in Costa Rican homes, to the point where it has produced a long line of garden varieties.
The national flower is easier to find on a patio in Heredia than in the forest it came from. Buy one from a nursery. Never take one off a tree.
One orchid out of one thousand six hundred and eighty-four
Picking a single orchid to represent Costa Rica was a harder job than it sounds.
The Lankester Catalogue of Costa Rican Orchidaceae, published in December 2023 by the Jardín Botánico Lankester at the Universidad de Costa Rica, records 1,684 orchid species in 201 genera — and about 30% of them grow nowhere else on earth.
That is 324 species more than the previous catalogue twenty years earlier, a net increase of almost a quarter. Costa Rica is still finding orchids.
For scale: this is a country the size of West Virginia, and it holds more orchid species than the whole of Europe.
The tree that flowers like a switch being thrown
If you are new here, this is the one that will stop you in the street.
The corteza amarilla (Tabebuia ochracea) spends the dry season looking dead — bare grey branches, no leaves. Then, over a single day, every tree of that species for miles around erupts into solid yellow at exactly the same time.
The mechanism was worked out at the Área de Conservación Guanacaste, and it is precise:
- A cold day in the dry season is the trigger.
- The trees flower nine to ten days later.
- The flowers last four or five days, then drop.
- Every tree in the population does it together, which is the whole point — a species scattered thin across dry forest can only cross-pollinate if it all opens at once.
Because they do not use every bud at once, they can do it again later in the same dry season. Rain will also set it off.
So the yellow hillsides are not a season. They are an event, they last under a week, and if you want to see them you have to be looking about ten days after a cold snap.
Its pink relative lines the streets
The roble sabana (Tabebuia rosea) is the same trick in pink, and it is one of the most planted street and park trees in the country. In the dry season whole avenues in and around San José turn pale pink and then carpet the pavement.
It is worth knowing the two names apart, because Costa Ricans use them as seasonal markers the way other countries use cherry blossom.
The flower Costa Ricans eat
This is the one no visitor guide mentions, and it is the most Costa Rican thing on the list.
The itabo (Yucca guatemalensis) is planted along boundaries as a living fence — its roots hold loose ground together, which matters on a slope. With the first rains, around April and May, it throws up a tall spike of creamy white bell flowers.
And then people eat them.
Research published by the Universidad de Costa Rica describes the practice in detail. The flowers are bitter — the buds and the centres most of all — so those are picked out, and the petals are cooked. In Guanacaste and the Central Valley that usually means scrambled with egg, or with potato, onion and herbs. Around Zarcero and Atenas it goes the other way entirely, into a sweet cajeta made with the petals, milk and cinnamon.
The timing puts it squarely in Semana Santa, when it becomes a Holy Week dish. In rural parishes people also donate itabo flowers to the Huerto, the decorated garden set up beside the church.
If someone offers you flor de itabo con huevo at Easter, that is not a novelty. That is the season on a plate.
The orange one holding the coffee up
The poró (Erythrina) carries dense heads of curved orange-red flowers on a tree that is planted for work rather than for looks. Cut a branch, push it into the ground, and it roots — which is why it is used as a living fence post across the country, and why it stands in rows through coffee plantations, where it provides shade and puts nitrogen back into the soil.
When it flowers on a bare tree in the dry months it is the most conspicuous thing on the hillside, and it is full of birds.
The one that is not really a flower
Heliconias — platanillas to Costa Ricans — are the stacked scarlet and orange “lobster claws” you will see along every damp roadside and in every hotel planting.
The colourful parts are not petals. They are bracts: modified leaves forming a series of boat-shaped cups, with the small real flowers tucked down inside them. The cups hold water, the shape suits a curved hummingbird bill, and the whole structure is essentially a piece of equipment for hummingbirds. Several heliconia species and certain hermit hummingbirds have shaped each other over a long time.
The bracts also last for weeks, which is why they turn up in every arrangement in the country.
And the famous ones that came from somewhere else
Worth saying plainly, because it is the most common mistake in writing about this subject.
The veranera — bougainvillea — that blazes magenta over half the walls in the country is South American. Hibiscus came from Asia. The bird of paradise is South African. Plumeria, the frangipani, is Central American but was spread everywhere by people. Torch ginger is Southeast Asian.
They are genuinely part of what Costa Rica looks like now, and nobody sensible objects to them. They are simply not what makes the flora here remarkable. The remarkable part is 1,684 orchids, a third of them found nowhere else, and a dry forest that decides to flower on a ten-day timer.
If you are going to garden here
Two things surprise almost every newcomer.
The seasons are backwards from what you expect. The great flowering displays — corteza, roble sabana, poró — happen in the dry season, on bare trees, when a temperate gardener assumes nothing is happening. The green months are green, not floral.
Buy plants, do not collect them. Orchids in particular. The reason the national flower is scarcer in the forest than on the patio is that people took them, and Costa Rica has excellent nurseries precisely so that nobody needs to.
Staying long enough to watch a garden grow
People fall for the country in a fortnight and want to stay. The plants are usually somewhere in that decision.
CRIE — Costa Rica Immigration Experts handles residency applications, renewals, permanent residency and citizenship, including for a great many people who came for a holiday and never fully left.
See the types of residency in Costa Rica, or get in touch.
Botanical detail from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the Jardín Botánico Lankester at the Universidad de Costa Rica, the Área de Conservación Guanacaste, and the Universidad de Costa Rica’s Alimentación y Cultura project.
Article by Glenn Tellier (Founder of CRIE and Grupo Gap)
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