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 species in the conditions you are given.  We've done pretty good, I guess.

Our goal to maximize diversity is an important one.  Within this 9 x 18' frame are at least 20 species of native wildflowers and grasses.  There's more bare space than before and this will give us an opportunity to add a few more plants, but right now we're just letting everything settle in now that we've had some reliable rain.  There's no rush to replant.

Part of choosing the right plants has been choosing species that play well together.  That's a trait that seems too often ignored based on the many posts I read on social media. I'll use Spanish needle (Bidens alba) as an example of what I mean.  Spanish needle has a great many properties to commend it, but playing nice with others is not one of them.  It is great along a roadside across the street from our house, but if it had been in this meadow during the last few months of neglect, I suspect that it would have taken the opportunity to overwhelm its neighbors.,  Its done it before to me in other landscapes when I tried to be nicer.  

Real wildflower meadows/prairies are some of the most diverse plant communities anywhere in the world.  Their natural diversity is what makes them so important to so many species - pollinators and up the food chain.  If our landscapes, including ours here in Pasco County, are to mimic anything like the real world and provide real habitat value, they must be diverse, composed of species willing to form a diverse community, and resilient to changes in their growing environment.  We're doing our best here and challenge you to do the same.  We need to plant communities, not single species monocultures. To do that, we need plants that play nice with others.  There's really no room for bullies.