There Were No Fences

A few weeks ago my new neighbor decided to severely prune two of my trees that are near our property line while I was away for the weekend.  What once provided an ecological and effective screen was removed and hauled to the curb for trash pickup.  These were both trees that I had grown from seed and species not commonly grown commercially and they meant a lot to me.  The silk bay ( Persea humilis ) seed came from a plant in a Lake Wales Ridge scrub that I visited several times a year for at least two decades.  It has since been cleared and a house with a turfgrass yard has now replaced it.  The sandhill haw ( Crataegus lassa ) seed came from a few ripe haws that I collected near the entrance of Torreya State Park. The tree was one that my friend, Gil Nelson, identified for me or I would have thought it was just a variety of summer haw ( C . flava ).  Plants I've grown from seed always have special meaning to me as they conjure up memories of excursions or ...

Nearly a year ago, Jane and I set out a small dresser that we had no use for anymore.  The plan was to fit it into the back of my car and take it to a secondhand store as a donation, but it didn't quite turn out the way we planned.  The dresser was soon colonized by honeybees and that's where things stand today.  I am a beekeeper with no knowledge of beekeeping. Although honeybees are not native, I welcomed them anyhow. My thought was that they would assist in the pollination of our landscape plants. Species like my scaleleaf aster ( Symphyotrichum adnatum ) have never been adequately pollinated by the native bees in our landscape - largely because it blooms so late in the year that the native bees and butterflies have largely gone to rest for the winter.  Honeybees remain active year-round as long as temperatures are above freezing.   There is a lot of controversy surrounding the impact that honeybees have on native species.  I do not believe that the...

  As we embark on our mission to change the world through our landscaping, we cannot ignore the impact our neighbors will have on our success.  After all, the natural world does not respect the presence of property lines  and what we find our landscapes surrounded by is what the rest of the natural world actually sees. When I lived in Seminole with my ex-wife, migratory birds found our landscape and very rarely could be seen beyond the property lines of our typical residential lot.  The exceptions were the ground-foraging species - the thrushes, ovenbirds, worm-eating warblers, and the water thrushes.  Our neighbors to the west also had a cluster of mature live oaks adjacent to our property-line fence and between us, we had a significant expanse of open understory covered by leaf litter.  Each year during migration all of these birds visited and foraged across both sides of our fence.  I am convinced that, without their extra habitat, we would have bee...