Photo: Craig Franklin, CC BY-SA 3.0 au (via Wikimedia Commons)
Beehive Ginger
Zingiber spectabile
Also known as Wax Ginger, Cone Ginger, Tepus (Malay)
Key benefits
✦Traditional uses
✦Long before it became a prized ornamental in tropical gardens worldwide, beehive ginger grew quietly in the shaded understory of Southeast Asian rainforests, where local communities in Malaysia and Indonesia came to know it as one of the many wild "tepus" gingers. Its young shoots and flower buds have traditionally found their way into the kitchen as a vegetable, and like its better known cousin true ginger, its aromatic rhizome has traditionally been used in the region to settle the stomach after a heavy meal. Today it is grown across the tropics and in warm greenhouses everywhere mostly for the sheer theater of its bloom, a stack of waxy golden bracts that looks uncannily like a hive built by very tidy bees.
How to grow & use it
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- ✦Lemongrass
- ✦Turmeric
- ✦Galangal
- ✦True ginger (Zingiber officinale)
- ✦Galangal
“When the garden asks for something that looks like it hummed itself into bloom.”
The showy "hive" is not made of petals at all, it is a tower of overlapping waxy bracts, and the plant's actual small flowers emerge one or two at a time from between them, easy to miss unless you look closely.
Beehive ginger is a relative of culinary ginger and may have a mild blood-thinning effect, so those on anticoagulant medication, or with gallstones, should use caution. It is far less studied than true ginger, so it's best treated as a food and garden plant rather than a medicine.