Things You Should Know

 


                                                                        Red maple


In actuality, there’s a great many things that you should know and this is really not the most important one.  It’s just that this simple thing is something that I’ve had to answer a great many times lately from posts on social media and from questions I get when engaged in public speaking.  It has to do with knowing where the plant you have added or plan to add to your landscape originally came from. 

I think that most of us purchase a plant never knowing this.  We either trust that the advice we get from friends or a nursery suffices; that they wouldn’t be selling this to you if it wasn’t appropriate to your landscape.  To be fair, this is often the case, but it may not really be enough.  I liken this to purchasing a pet.  Very few of us would purchase a new pet without doing a bit of research on what we would be purchasing.  We prepare for making this addition to our household and we get everything in place before adding it.  With plants, too often we simply purchase and plant.  We ignore the fact that plants are complicated living beings just as animals are and that our success with each addition is vastly improved by knowing something about it.

One thing that you need to know is where this plant occurs naturally.  Understand that every plant, native or otherwise, evolved within a plant community within a geographic region.  It may be adaptable to conditions outside of this, but its best growth and performance will come when grown under the conditions it evolved in.  Not long ago, someone in a social-media gardening group I’m a member of was extoling the fact that her coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) had survived the recent freeze unscathed and was beginning to bloom.  It’s wonderful that this was true, but it seemed obvious to me that she wasn’t aware that coral honeysuckle occurs all the way north to upstate New York where it survives just fine in truly freezing temperatures.  Knowing the natural range of your plant before you plant it is important; especially in understanding its response to temperature conditions.  If the plant you are considering to add has a natural range that extends north of us here in central Florida, you can be assured that it is tolerant of freezing temperatures and won’t need protection during one of the cold spells that we get each winter. If it only occurs in extreme south Florida or the islands, it may very well not be able to withstand a freeze.

For native Florida plants or those native to North America, it is simple to check this out and it may well save you a lot of anxiety in the future.  For native Florida plants, look at its range map on the Florida Plant Atlas hosted by the Institute of Systematic Botany (ISB) at the University of South Florida. Use this link: https://florida.plantatlas.usf.edu/ and type in the Latin name of your plant into the search feature. You also can change the search feature to the common name, but the Latin name is the most dependable and is the default.  If you want to know where else in North America your plant may occur, you can search BONAP (the Biota of North America Program) and it will show you the full range of the species.  You can use this link: http://bonap.net/Napa/Genus/Traditional/County/. 

Sometimes, even this is not sufficient to give you a really accurate account because you really should know where in this plant’s natural range your plant came from.  A good example is red maple (Acer rubrum).  Red maple has a very extensive range within North America,  My family had one in Wisconsin in my home landscape and it occurs all the way south into mainland Monroe County.  Specimens you might purchase from a local plant nursery may come from stock from nearly anywhere within this range.  Northern red maples from Wisconsin or Tennessee, for example, will always “think” that they still are from there and they will never perform well being planted here.  Ask your nurseryperson where their plants originally came from.  It can be very important. 

Take a little time to know your plants before you purchase them,  There’s a lot of other important factors besides the ones I’ve discussed here. Taking a bit of time before you complete your purchase can make a big difference in how well it performs after you plant it.

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