Starting Over

I've spent most of my adult life working with creating wildlife habitat in developed landscapes; first as the State Wildlife Extension Specialist at the University of Kentucky, then as an Urban Wildlife Extension Specialist at the University of Florida, until today as an author/lecturer working also as an Adjunct Professor at St. Petersburg College, Baccalaureate Biology Program.  In 1992, I was fortunate to be given a house to live in within the 9,000-acre Brooker Creek Preserve as part of my job managing Pinellas County's Environmental Lands.  I was surrounded on all sides by Florida wilderness. Each year, white-tailed deer would bring their fawns into my yard, barred owls would nest there, and wildlife of all kinds would visit frequently. I had little to do to make my landscape wildlife friendly. My home came with this landscape. My three sons were raised here. They did not have video games to distract them from real life. Reality was just outside the front door and they made good use of their years there.

I parted with this position in 2004 and bounced around a bit in dreary apartments with no landscapes until I remarried in 2007. My wife and I first met at a Florida Native Plant Society plant sale years before this. In fact, I sold her a turkey oak that day that I eventually inherited with my marriage......
Alexa had already initiated a landscape makeover when I moved in. She had eliminated much of the turf and had planted two slash pines and an eastern red cedar in the front as shade trees. A small grove of live oak in the back corner of the lot had been left by the developer as well as a small cluster of saw palmetto in the front. Alexa had added a line of Simpson's stopper along the road in the front and several more in the back. Last, she had almost by accident added my favorite tree between the two pines - a fringe tree that she had purchased as something else. A small pond/stream system had been installed in the side yard where an in-ground swimming pool had once existed.

With these components in place, I set about to add what I deemed to be the missing pieces. During the 12 years that Alexa and I were together, our landscape evolved and became an amazing place for wildlife. Over the years, we were regularly visited each migration by close to three dozen wood warblers, as well as tanagers, buntings, grosbeaks, vireos, and cuckoos. Resident northern cardinals, blue jays, catbirds, tufted titmice, Carolina chickadees, mourning doves and Carolina wrens provided all kinds of activity the rest of the year. We planted nearly every host plant for butterflies of our region and a great many native pollinator plants. One day, I counted 7 different bees from a single vantage point in our garden. All this activity was not the norm in the rest of our neighborhood. Ours was a habitat island in a sea of turf grass lawns and plastic plants that provided no real habitat value. 

During our 12 years together, I relished my time bird watching on the back deck and exploring the wildflower patches for pollinators. While most of my birding enthusiasts posted about their trips to various regional nature parks, I took great pleasure from my birding trips in my own landscape, sitting in a comfortable chair with my binoculars handy, sometimes with an adult beverage. In my mind, I was watching the direct result of my landscaping actions. These were my birds; not those somehow nurtured by the land-management actions of state and local government agencies, but my personal targeted ones. In my mind there is no greater satisfaction than this.

Alexa and I recently divorced and she has put her home on the market. Heaven help what will become of my plants as the vast majority have become too large to move and the future owners of this home are very unlikely to leave the landscape unscathed. It has been my policy to never go back to former landscapes. It has always been heartbreaking. Each of us has our own sense of aesthetic and few purchase a home and don't tinker with the landscape. My hope is that the future owners do not raze what is there and replace it once again with turf. 

My move has been to a rental property one county north. It is a subdivision of basically well-cared for homes, many rented as mine is. In my explorations around my new neighborhood, I have yet to see a garden of any kind, much less a planting of something native. There are a few accidental natives here and there, but nothing purposely planted. In the square mile around me, I would hazard to guess that nearly half are covered in gravel instead of turf. As a good friend whose parents once lived close to here told me the other day: after planting turf for the third time and having it destroyed by pests, they gave up and covered it all in gravel. Sometimes, this gravel is only a dressing over landscape cloth or, worse, tar, to make sure that no life emerges from the soil beneath. Elsewhere, my neighbors have turf from lot line to lot line. Infrequently, a non-native shrub or tree has been planted in this grassland desert. Sometimes, an invasive non-native has been left alone to mature in this matrix of gravel and turf.

I am starting over. It is a challenge that I look forward to. In a way, everything I've learned and practiced these past decades is getting put to the test. My landscape is virtually devoid of wildlife habitat as is the neighborhood surrounding me.  A multi-trunk camphor tree, a Class 1 invasive plant in Florida, is the only tree in my landscape.  A pathetic crepe myrtle occurs in the far back corner of my lot. It has been beheaded so many times over the years that is has no idea which trunk to stick out next. It will be put out its misery as one of my first landscape acts of mercy.  Four Asiatic crinum lilies have been planted along the chain link fence that separates my next door neighbor to the south and an overly rotund yesterday, today & tomorrow shrub grows in isolation next to the house on its backside. Last, a sorry collection of non-native shrubs has been planted as a "foundation planting" in the front. How this practice of landscaping the foundation of our homes came about, is a mystery to me, but it seems deeply ingrained in the psyche of many Americans. The remainder of my landscape is dense turf.

As I moved in, I asked my new landlords if it was ok that I put a wildflower bed in the front. Thankfully, they gave me permission. I do not believe they have any idea of how large I plan to make it or what I plan to do in the back. As I design, eradicate things and plant others, I plan to write about it. As this desert I inherited morphs into an oasis, I plan to write about that also.  Thanks for joining my on this journey.