There Were No Fences

Newly emerged eastern black swallowtail  A couple of days ago, the last of my newest set of eastern black swallowtails emerged from their chrysalises in my landscape.  This time of year, their mother laid her eggs on my native water dropwort ( Tiedemannia filiformis ) that had recently begun blooming. Each fall, the butterflies find this plant as the blooms begin to develop and the caterpillars eat them to the nub.  It's a ritual I anticipate and it's one that rarely leaves me with seed to propagate for my nursery, Hawthorn Hill.  I have to collect seed in other areas where there are so many plants that at least some of them escape the herbivory.  In my experience, water dropwort is the best native plant to feed eastern black swallowtails with and it is one I consider indispensable in every landscape I've planted since moving to Florida. The rub is that they only lay eggs on it in the late summer when it begins to bloom. Until that time, the plant is ignored. This is true f

Weeds emerging from the scrub sand As I expected, the area that I have been planning my scrub in has fast become fertile ground for weeds. Despite the fact that I have added 250 pounds of clean play sand to this area, the weed seeds residing in the soil beneath it all are germinating.  I'm not surprised  by what is happening right now. Weed seeds are some of the most tenacious living organisms on the planet and they are always around, waiting their chance to sprout and take possession of a disturbed landscape; even in relatively sterile sand like I have here. I have planned for this. It's taken me a great many years of gardening experience, but I've learned not to plant a new bed immediately. I now wait for the weeds before I plant and I pull them as they emerge. If I had planted this area right away, the weeding would have been made much more difficult. I know now that everything that emerges in this new bed is unplanned.  Forget the oft-written platitudes I see on social

Laying out the dimensions. The brick edging will ultimately be 2 bricks high. Ready to add the sand. The vegetation that was once inside the planting are has been removed.   Finished It is always a bit difficult to radically change the site conditions you inherit with your property.  On a large landscape scale, it is best to simply go with what you have and to select plants adapted to your site conditions - abiotic factors such as soils and moisture levels.  That said, it is not a large undertaking to radically alter small areas to create conditions that are not present.  In the early days following my move here, I created two separate wetlands in my otherwise "pine flatwoods" site. One of them, a large pot within a plastic swimming pool, is evident in the photos above.  I have written about this and my in-ground wetland designed with a pond liner in earlier posts.  It is rather easy to create wetlands for wetland plants. It is a bit more difficult to create well-drained upla