In full flower

Colorful caladiums cover Lake Placid.

Florida has plenty of smalltown festivals built around local products – strawberries, every type of seafood, even swamp cabbage.

But Lake Placid has a product you might not know about – caladiums – and the charming Central Florida town is celebrating the colorful landscaping plant with its 28th annual Caladium Festival July 27 to 29.

The Caladium Festival will offer arts and crafts, wine tasting, a beer garden, food booths, entertainment and an antique and classic car show. There is a schedule of entertainment that includes cloggers, country bands, classic rock, blue grass and local favorites.

But the caladiums are the star of the festival. You can buy them and even take a bus tour of the caladium farms in the area. The town will be full of them.

If you’re a gardener in South Florida, you know caladiums as those summer plants with vividly colored leaves in shades of red, white and pink. The big leaves come in various shapes and add color to gardens when it’s too hot to grow much else. There are more than 40 varieties of caladiums, which are in the jack-in-the pulpit family.

Lake Placid calls itself the Caladium Capital of the World because it grows 98 percent of the world’s supply of caladiums. There are 14 farming families with 1,200 acres of the plants and they’ve been growing caladiums in Lake Placid since the 1940s.