December 2019 - Looking Back at the Past Year

Walter's aster (Symphyotrichum walteri)
Silver aster (Symphyotrichum concolor)

Garberia (Garberia heterophylla)

Flyr's nemesis (Brickellia cordifolia)
With one holiday over and another looming in the near-future, there's a bit of time in between to catch my breath and reflect on what this landscape has achieved over the past year. It's hard for me to believe that a year has passed since I made my move to my new (rental) home in Pasco and began my landscaping makeover. What began as a simple 9 x 19' rectangle of St Augustine lawn surrounded on all sides by more of the same, has quickly developed into the pollinator garden I imagined it becoming.  Over the past year, seedlings I either brought from my former home in Seminole or grew here at my hobby nursery that I call Hawthorn Hill have mostly matured, flowered and set seed. As the flowers progressed, so did the number and diversity of pollinators. The near-extirpation of pollinators that occurred several months ago and that I wrote about previously, has recovered to its original levels.
Over the past few weeks, I've been very busy collecting seed for my nursery - hoping to get good germination on about 40 species that I can then share with the public. That is always exciting. Seed that I have left alone is also starting to germinate and it would look like I'll have far more black-eyed susan (Rudbeckia hirta) , wild petunia (Ruellia caroliniensis) and tickseed (Coreopsis spp.) than I originally planted. In a way, this is the tough part - recognizing the weeds that still want to establish themselves from the wildflowers and making decisions about how many of each of these self-seeding wildflowers I can leave alone and still have room for everyone else. Management is a forever thing once you've made a commitment to your plant community.
I've got one more aster (Symphyotrichum adnatum) that has yet to open its buds. I expect that to occur next week and the parade of wildflowers will be over for 2019. By then, it will almost be time for 2020.


Scrub blazing star (Liatris tenuifolia) - ripe seed


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ethics of Collecting Seed

Image
I've been writing lately about seeds and using them to create what is often called a pollinator meadow. A great many of the plants in my new landscape were grown from seed. Frankly, I have always loved sowing seeds and watching them sprout. I started in early childhood and I've been doing it since. It's rewarding and the anticipation of waiting for seeds to sprout is difficult to match unless you play the lottery. I rarely purchase seeds. I collect them. When I can, I purchase a few plants of a species I wish to add to my landscape and I then collect their seed after they bloom. If a plant doesn't prosper sufficiently to set seed for me, it is not a plant I wish to continue to grow. Over the years, I've tried a great many plants that I've failed to adequately provide for. Today in my landscape, I'm trying a few that I've never tried before. The exceptions come from plants that are not available in the trade. To grow these from seed, I need to collect
Read more

Wildflower Meadows - The Importance of Grasses

Image
A Natural Wildflower "Meadow" - Apalachicola National Forest I grew up in the prairie Midwest and was fortunate to have been caught up in the prairie restoration movement that blazed brightly in the last few decades of this past century. Very little of our original prairie ecosystems remain as the rich prairie soils were quickly converted to agricultural uses as European settlers swarmed their way over the continent.  These ecosystems are extremely diverse, regardless of where they occur. From the tall-grass prairies of the Midwest to the rockland prairies of the Mid-South and the true dry prairie systems here in Florida where I now reside, there are several universal characteristics - they are some of the most species diverse systems in the world and they are dominated by grasses. Grasses, in all their many shapes and forms, are what form the foundation of any "meadow." That must also be true for all the "wildflower meadows" I see extolled on s
Read more

A Pollinator Garden is More than Wildflowers

Image
A natural grass-dominated meadow in the shade Splitbeard bluestem - Andropogon ternarius Lopsided Indiangrass - Sorghastrum secundum Sites on social media that are promoting pollinator gardens are rife with posts about wildflowers. Folks seeking to make their landscapes pollinator friendly seem to be almost-universally focused on wildflowers. What these well-meaning people seem to not understand is the importance of native grasses. Meadows, prairies, and other wildflower-dominated systems are mostly grass. Grasses form the backbone of every one of these plant communities. It isn't the wildflowers. They simply provide most of the color - but a living landscape is not about color, it's about creating habitat, and this habitat requires us to incorporate native grasses. It is true that the vast majority of grasses, and their graminoid relatives, are wind pollinated. They do not provide nectar and pollen for the most part, but despite that they are significant. More s
Read more