Hi Jerry, I am no pro but I would say choose plants that have varied shades of green and use the foliage to play off each other. The Japanese Garden uses more plants for foliage than for the flowers. If you do have plants that flower try to plan so only one plant is in bloom at any given time.

Hope this helps.

Cheers Jando

Jerry a good friend reminded me that white flowers are avoided in Japanese Gardens because they represent death.

Jerry, the person who created the Morikami Garden is well versed in the use of plant material appropriate for Japanese gardens. He is from Japan and has installed gardens in temperate and tropical environments. If you know who he is go to his webiste otherwise drop me an email and I will email the web address to you.
David

Jerry,

I love Morikami gardens. Whenever I go down to South Florida I try to stop by.

One thing I did not see at Morikami though was the use of Native Sand Pines (Pinus clausa) in place of the dwarfed pines normally used in Japanese Gardens.

The sand pine takes trimming very well. It was once used for Christmas trees, and kept trimmed into neat cones. You can trim them into big bonzai shapes. I haven't done it myself, but I saw of photograph of a beautiful sand pine trimmed this way.

I think you can really get the feel of the Japanese garden using easy-care natives and naturalized plants if you just go for the same style of planting. For example, for those low mounding shrubs, you could use coonties. Lots of the native stoppers can be trimmed into picturesque little trees. There is of course a big selection of tropical bamboo. The one problem is finding a substitute for the Japanese maple, which won't grow down there. At Morikami I noticed they were using Firebushes for this effect, but to be honest I wasn't really crazy about it. Finding a deciduous small tree with "fall color" that will work down there would be difficult, but there must be some kind of tropical shrub or small tree with burgundy/reddish leaves. You wouldn't have the change of seasons, but you could have the look.

Down where you are you probablly have access to lots of natural Florida limestone rocks too.

Jerry,
another way to look for plants which are used in tropical areas may be found in Okinawa and Hawaii, where, the climate zones are closer to Florida.
In Hawaii, in place of maples, strawberry guava are used.
David