There Were No Fences

Littlehip haw - Crataegus spathulata May haw - Crataegus aestivalis Summer haw - Crataegus flava I have a special love of hawthorns ( Crataegus spp.) that I cannot trace back to any one instance or event in my life. It could be that my love of all things related to the ancient Celts had something to do with it. The Celts found magic in hawthorns. The folklore surrounding hawthorns is widespread. Other European cultures associated haws with May Flowers - Mary's Flowers - and they hung them on their doorways to bring good luck and to protect it from evil spirits. It may be that my love of this genus started to "blossom" in full after I moved south from my earlier life in the Midwest. Up north, there are just so many flowering trees in the rose/apple family to use in one's landscape and I've loved roses from early childhood. With my move to Florida, I soon discovered that the vast majority of roses that I was familiar with could not be grown here with a...

Pinebarren Frostweed Greeneyes Pine Lily I have a good friend of mine that meets conflict by stating that all she wants is peace and beauty. She has no time for anything else, but in landscapes as well as in relationships, we can't have peace and beauty without putting in a great deal of work. Landscapes don't happen by divine accident. Beauty doesn't come without forethought. Peace doesn't come until after we've put in a great deal of work. All of us find our own beauty in the things we surround ourselves with. Aesthetics is in the eye of the beholder and few of us are willing to keep a landscape devoid of the beauty we seek. It has never been my intention to denigrate someone's sense of beauty. As my landscape develops, I spend more time in it as it brings me joy to see flowers opening and pollinators visiting them. Each is beautiful to me and I could care less if my neighbors also find it beautiful or if they consider it an eyesore to the sea o...

Bumblebee of Garberia - Not My Home... Yet... Lakeside Sunflower Like an expectant parent, I've been waiting patiently these past 9 months for the arrival of my first bumblebee. It arrived a few days ago and yesterday I found it busily pollinating my small patch of lakeside sunflowers ( Helianthus carnosus ). Bumblebees hold a special place in my heart for a number of reasons, and its arrival signaled to me that things are starting to be "right" in my new landscape. Over these past 9 months, my wildflower planting has been developing and plants that I first added are reaching maturity. The lakeside sunflower was added several months ago, but they have grown quickly from the small seedlings I had in pots to the multi-stemmed flowering plants that they are today. Like everything in the aster family, they attract the attention of a great many different pollinators. Yesterday, they brought in my first bumblebee. As I watched, the bumblebee went from each flower head...

Native Black-eyed Susan Lakeside Sunflower Chapman's Goldenrod Most plantings do well during "normal" conditions. It's the extreme events that tell us whether we've chosen our plants well. Freezing temperatures, for example here in central Florida, weed out those that are not adapted. Mostly, however, it's extreme moisture. During a drought, we can water our plants to help them get through it. There isn't much of anything we can do when the skies open up and drop huge amounts of rain is a short amount of time. Since I've begun my new landscape project here in Holiday, my plants have had to go through several periods of time where I've had nearly a foot of rain in less than a week. These past three days have been one of those times. Most plants can handle lots of rain if the soil drains well. Lucky for me, this seems to be the case here. Roots need to breathe. For that, they need air spaces within the soil particles. Soils that remain...

My Wetland Pot 8/16/19 Eryngium aquaticum Eryngium integrifolium I have posted several times about my created wetland that uses a pond liner to prevent water from soaking into the ground. I capture water during rain events from my downspout and direct it into this area. The soil stays saturated during wet times and rarely dries down to the point that it needs extra watering. The plants in this area are doing exceptionally well and it has allowed me to grow a number of species important to my landscape objectives. It is, for example, a perfect place for my 2 species of wetland milkweeds and my water dropwort ( Tiedemannia filiformis ). The latter is now starting to bloom and soon will attract the attention of eastern black swallowtails. Today, I wanted to post an update on my "other wetland" - the large landscape pot that sits in a black plastic pool. This is a different kind of wetland as it is meant to stay saturated. Rain events fill the pool and this water s...

Black-eyed Susans August 3 Same Black-eyed Susans August 15 North End of the Wildflower Garden August 15 I may no pretense regarding my love of seeds over cuttings. To me, there is something Frankensteinish about cutting a plant down into pieces and forcing them to make roots. It is a method that also reduces the gene pool of one's plantings - unless you take cuttings from a lot of different plants. I like the process of planting seeds and watching for them to start sprouting.  It's kind of like my childhood at Christmas. Weeks of anticipation that is eventually rewarded. It may take a bit longer to grow plants from seeds instead of cuttings, but to me it is worth it. Over the past week, my landscape has seen more than its share of rainfall. It was the perfect time to plant my small seedlings from my Hawthorn Hill nursery. Some of these plants were teetering on the brink of death - they hate being confined to a pot. Species that I truly love, like woody goldenrod...

Playing in the Dirt I've read that getting your hands in the dirt is somehow good for your health. I am not a psychologist, but I know that I get great satisfaction out of getting my hands in it. There is something very therapeutic about digging holes to plant things and in getting down into the soil to pull weeds. Today, like every day, I pulled weeds. Some folks ask if my new landscape requires me to weed. Of course it does. I do not find that to be an onerous task. Pulling up the bad actors and freeing up space for the plants I want gives me pleasure. We know now a great deal more about how plants communicate with each other. There are vast underground and above-ground networks that allow plants to know who is around them. They provide some help to those in the network that are relatives and they compete with those that aren't. How exactly they do that is for the researchers of the future. It's just enough for me to iknow that it is happening. We also know that plan...

Carolina Goldenrod ( Solidago arguta ) Chapman's Goldenrod ( Solidado odora var. chapmanii ) Over the years, goldenrods ( Solidago spp.) have been impugned as valuable landscape plants because of their supposed connection with hay fever. Of course, those of us that landscape with native wildflowers know better, but that still hasn't made the genus a staple in most landscapes and that is a shame. Goldenrods have a great place in a wildflower garden for pollinators. Not every goldenrod, however, plays nice in a mixed garden. They tend to spread rapidly by underground stems (rhizomes, to be exact). In a small landscape, like the one I'm planting, that trait is not to be embraced. In a large meadow, however, goldenrods can rapidly fill up an open space. I've been experimenting with goldenrods now for a good many years and I've added four species to my small mixed wildflower bed. These are the ones that I've found to be relatively well behaved in such a s...

Black-eyed Susan Seedlings January 30 2019 Potted Seedlings 8/3/2019 Same-aged seedlings planted 3 weeks previous to above As a gardener, we sometimes wait for just the right time to plant. I've done it lots of times in the past, but in general, the best time to plant a potted specimen is right now. Plants respond to real soil in a way they simply can't in a potting mix. Forget trying to match things up by fertilizing. It is not the same. It is true that most, if not all, potting mixes are short on fertilizer, but it is not a lack of fertility that causes the types of results pictured above with my black-eyed susans ( Rudbeckia hirta ). I have fertilized the nursery plants, but none of them show the same type of growth that the ones have in my landscape after about 3 weeks. As you can see, their foliage is much denser and they are sending up flower stalks. That is not the case with my nursery plants, though they are healthy with good root systems......... at least...

Monarch caterpillars and aphids on swamp pink milkweed ( Asclepias incarnata ) Carolina silverbell - leafcutter bee "damage" Pawpaw - Asimina triloba Somewhere, sometime in our lives we were all taught that our landscape plants should have "perfect" foliage - that having leaves chewed up or infested with "bugs" was something that needed to be immediately addressed. That address was invariably some pesticide that targeted everything living. As gardeners intent on creating a living landscape, we first have to rid ourselves of this faulty logic and then embrace the fact that our plants are truly alive. We celebrate the leaves that are being chewed upon as an indication that things are right. It is what leaves were made to do. Over millennia, plants have evolved to cope with herbivores in a great many ways. One of them is simply to grow new leaves... We trade "perfection" in our foliage for the life it provides for. When I first notice...