Playing Nice is Important
It's been a while since I've posted anything about our landscape here in Pasco County. With the long extended drought early this summer and my new job as Director of the USF Botanical Garden, this landscape has been largely negleacted - left to its own defenses. We don't have irrigation anywhere except for a couple of hoses; true here in the wildflower meadow as elsewhere. If you could read the rain gauge in the center of this photo, it would have not registered a single drop of rain for a nearly 2.5-month period from May-early July. What little rain fell during this time in Tampa where I work, did not reach this landscape. Now that Idalia has left and a few other rain events have reached us, what is left are the survivors and it looks a little bleak. We've lost a few things, but mostly everything that popped back out of the ground in early spring is still here and that's a relief. I hate losing plants and it demonstrates the need to plant the right ...