There Were No Fences

Palm warbler With the installation of my bird feeders and bath, I've taken to doing some bird watching again in my backyard. It's something I dearly miss from my previous landscape. There has just not been a good focal point here to witness the birds that share my home. That has changed. I've added a suet feeder and dried meal worms to what I initially had and it has given me the focal point I previously lacked. I now have a much better idea of what is around me. Today as I sat with my coffee and a pair of binoculars in my backyard, my neighbor's lawn service arrived and broke the relative silence of my bird watching. It was a shock to the system to say the least. Earlier, a red-shouldered hawk caused a brief intermission of the sounds of birds, but the lawn service was far more potent in causing a death to the silence I once had. My neighbor to my north has a small yard of the same proportions as mine, but it is a dead zone. I've never peeked over the wooden p...

Bird feeder and bath For most of my adult life, I have eschewed the use of feeders in my landscape, promoting instead creating landscapes that feed them naturally. I recently broke from my tradition and purchased and installed one. My landscape is just too many years away from doing what my birds need. I also have to admit that having this feeder (and bath) is fun. With it, I'm noticing birds that are in my area and getting an opportunity to make a difference in their diets. On the first day, I had tufted titmice and Carolina chickadees visit me, taking turns at plucking a shelled sunflower seed from the tube feeder and flying off into the cover behind me. Today, I had a pair of cardinals and a red-bellied woodpecker stop by as well. It's been rewarding to share my yard with these gorgeous birds. As my small woodland develops over the next few years, it might feed them also, but for now my feeder is indispensable. Landscapes can only do so much. I've also been p...

A patch of "weeds" at the edge of my landscape. A lot of pellitory ( Parietaria floridana ) and some cudweed, etc. Peppergrass - Lepidium virginicum Cudweed - Pseudognapthalium obtusifolium Weeds are always a bone of contention in a native plant landscape because we often differ as to what that means. Many of us are brought up to believe that a "weed" is undesirable or any plant growing in the "wrong" place. Botanically, those definitions tend to blur our discussion because weeds can be useful and they can grow in places we desire them to be. Weeds can be native or not. What makes a "weed" a weed is its growth habit. All of them share commonalities; most often the ability to quickly colonize open and disturbed places by producing huge amounts of seed. Weeds generally do not play well with others and given a bit of time and opportunity, they often overwhelm the more "behaved" species that we often typically wish to have i...

Wetland Understory - Arnoglossum lanceolata, Bacopa monnieri, Rudbeckia nitida Wetland Understory - Viola sorraria and Bacopa monnieri Packera aurea My created wetland has been developing quite well since I installed it more than a year ago. How I did this is a subject of one of my earliest posts so I won't describe it here; only to write that it is an area about 6 feet in diameter with a heavy-duty pool liner sunk about 2 1/2 feet below the surface. It receives most of its water from the drain spout coming off my roof that directs it into this area. Over the past weeks, I've been reading posts in social media that describe efforts to create wetlands such as this in a home landscape and almost without fail there is a discussion about amending the soil. This is not necessary, of course, and may even prove detrimental. In a real wetland, the soils are created naturally - over time, from the original soils that were present. In a created wetland the soils will for...

Red buckeye ( Aesculus pavia ) Alachua buckthorn ( Sideroxylon alachuense ) Perhaps it's because I get bored easily that I revel in a landscape that changes with the seasons. That is not accomplished with evergreen species very well and it definitely can't be done using the tropical nonnative species so widely used where I live in central Florida. To me, those tropical plants are not really any different than ones made out of plastic. Day after day, year after year, they grow but never really change other than that. In my mind, I could just as easily paint a picture of them on my window - there's never anything new to see. The sameness bores me to death and is the singlemost thing that causes many of my Floridian neighbors to complain that we have no seasons here.  It is actually planned blandness. I choose to plan for change. With spring inching a bit closer with each passing day, my plants seem to be changing daily as well.  Here in my part of Florida, deciduous...

Hawthorn Hill Native Wildflowers (my backyard)  February 5, 2020 This time of year is always an exciting time for me - full of hope and anticipation for the promise of a new batch of native Florida wildflowers. As I grow my plants from seed, I never quite know what to expect. Some flats come up so thick that I'd never have enough room to pot them all up individually - let alone find enough homes for them either. A few come up sporadically and a few others just never materialize. I've never been able to predict this with any accuracy, but I've learned that I need to sow my seed as soon as they are ripe, no mater what the month, and that I need to plant them as shallowly as I can get away with - just a dusting of soil over them to keep them from blowing away. I began my hobby wildflower nursery as a way to share wildflowers that just aren't widely propagated by folks who try to do this for a living. I've always been a collector and it drove me crazy that so many ...

Metallic green bee and a hawthorn ( Crataegus spp.) flower Two-winged silverbell ( Halesia diptera ) A pollinator garden is not a wildflower garden if done correctly. It simply can't be. Many who have recently embraced the connection between pollinators and flowering plants seriously fail to grasp the very real importance of woody plants in a pollinator landscape. To many, a pollinator garden is a plot of native wildflowers and very little else. The truth is that a carefully thought out pollinator garden is everything in your landscape - including the trees and shrubs. Not because some of the woody plants serve as larval hosts for butterflies and moths, but because so many are critical at providing pollen and nectar during the early spring when very few wildflowers are in bloom. Honey bee and flowering red maple ( Acer rubrum ) Here in Florida, where I've lived for 33 years, I can garden 12 months out of the year, but although it is warm enough to putter around ...

Stokes aster - Stokesia laevis Stokes aster in my landscape - January 31 2020 My wildflower garden is taking shape. Where once I could pull just about everything out that emerged from my planting area as being something I did not plant or want, I now have a great many seedlings of the plants I originally planted. The garden is on autopilot. It is self organizing and that is the way it was planned. I still have weeds that I need to remove periodically, but the huge seedbank of unwanted species is now mostly exhausted and what is mostly coming up are the wildflowers that I let go to seed. I have learned a few things over the many years that I have been doing this - here and elsewhere. It is not practical to start a new wildflower "meadow" by simply casting seeds in a barren area - at least not one like the one I created from my former lawn. The seeds of my lawn weeds were aggressive and plentiful. The only thing I left alone were those of the Canadian toadflax ( Linari...