There Were No Fences

Author, botanist & conservation biologist, Robin Wall Kimmerer, writes about the Circle of Reciprocity in her wonderful book, Braiding Sweetgrass;  in my opinion, the most important book about our relationship to the land since Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac.  What strikes me as most poignant in Dr. Kimmerer's book is coming to an understanding of how we have artificially separated ourselves from the living world in a way most, if not all, native peoples don't. It's this separation of us vs them that seems to most fuel our rapacious hunger for goods and services and our inability to acknowledge these gifts and to consider giving back what we take. The Circle of Reciprocity teaches us to revere what the rest of the world has given us and allows us to feel a sense of responsibility to give something back in return. In our modern Eurocentric culture, we name other living things, but we do so in a way to separate ourselves from them. The striped mud turt...

Eastern Pondhawk  The wetland I created with a pond liner does not have standing water. It was not designed to be that kind of wetland. When it rains, as it did a few days ago, the water is directed into it from the rain gutters and the drain spout off the corner of my roof. The water saturates the soil and keeps the plants wet, but excess water exits the wetland on the side away from the house. There is a slight slope and this protects the foundation of the house from these conditions. The other wetland I created over a year ago, uses a plastic pool and it does hold water after a rain event. At times like these, the water evaporates after 3-4 days, but during the summer rainy season, it almost constantly has standing water. This creates both positives and negatives. The negatives are all related to the fact that standing water breeds mosquitoes and that mosquitoes breed disease. Regardless of also having dragonflies and their larvae present in your landscape, having a stan...

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 ...

Some Seeds From My Landscape Plants I've been meaning to write about seeds and collecting them for some time and my last post made it finally seem like the right time. I make no pretense about where I stand on the issue of planting seeds or plants in a native plant landscape; I waffle a bit in the middle because I collect seed, plant it in flats of potting soil and then add the seedlings to my landscape. After a great many years of planting landscapes of native plants, I've learned that sowing seed directly into bare Florida soil almost never produces satisfactory results. There are just too many moving parts so to speak, and my bare-soil areas are always colonized most with aggressive lawn weeds when I try the direct seeding approach. It seems economical to purchase a packet of seed from a desired plant when you get 50-100 seeds for a few dollars instead of 1 plant for $4-5 and sometimes it is; just not often enough in my experience. Most of the problems related to seeds ...

My Pollinator/Wildflower Garden, May 12, 2020 Lance-leaved tickseed ( Coreopsis lanceolata ) Common tickseed ( Coreopsis leavenworthii ) As my wildflower garden part of my landscape continues to develop, I am always cognizant of the dichotomy of starting with seeds or plants. Social media pages are crammed full of posts from people looking for seed to start their pollinator gardens. Far fewer are looking for reputable nurseries that sell plants. To many people, it must seem easier and more economical to sow seed. Generally, it's not, but there are exceptions. Some seed keeps its viability for enough months after ripening to germinate from one of those seed packets sold in the trade or in hand-collected bags and containers of those looking for a short cut to a "meadow". What too many fail to realize is that seeds are complex organisms that contain a living embryonic plant waiting for its germination day. For a great many species, this wait can't last m...

November 2018 April 30, 2020 What a long strange trip it's been, as Jerry Garcia once sang. The pollinator/wildflower garden was my first landscaping project after moving into my new home in Holiday in October 2018. I liked the opportunities this landscape gave me, because it was essentially a blank slate. The sunny front yard was most unencumbered by trees; a camphor just to the south of this border and some foundation plantings up next to the home. As a rental, I couldn't take down the camphor, but I limbed it up and this allowed even more sunlight to reach my planting bed. It also gave me a really sunny portion inside the frame and a part that is less sunny in the late afternoon.  Some folks over the years have asked me what my neighbors think and if I've had issues with County Code Enforcement. The answer to the first question is that I have no idea and the answer to the second is no. My neighbors, except for those on my immediate south, rarely ven...