Thorns Are Fine




Thorny plants may be ignored by some but they are often some of the best plants for a living landscape.  Thorns not only protect plants from herbivory; they provide safe places for songbirds to build nests in.  The best also provide for pollinators and produce food for birds.  As I sit today on my front porch, one of the best is in full bloom and nothing comes close to providing nectar for my pollinators.  Tough bumelia (Sideroxylon tenax) is one of the best plants I've added to my landscape.  As its name suggests, it is tough.  I grew this one from seed collected in the Lake Wales Ridge in a scrub site that has since been bulldozed to make way for a new home and a lawn of turfgrass.  What now stands there is useless for wildlife; a situation too often occurring in this state hellbent on clearing our native plant communities out of existence.  At least I've saved this plant for the wildlife I'm landscaping for.  

Creating a landscape for other living things requires us to choose plants for their attributes, thorns and all.  The bumelias, genus Sideroxylon, are a group with much to be admired.  With my almost-new position at the USF Botanical Gardens in Tampa, I've been able to add nearly every species in this genus. A few are not thorny, but most are.  Some become tall trees, but most remain as medium-sized shrubs.  All produce hundreds of clusters of fragrant white flowers and small purple fruit.  In other landscapes that I've designed, birds have eaten these fruit and planted them in new places.  

Tough bumelia comes in two different forms.  In most of its range (which includes most of Florida), it becomes a small tree. Mine from the Lake Wales Ridge is different and likely will someday be granted its own nomenclature.  On the Ridge, tough bumelia grows as a gnarly shrub with very dense copper-colored "hairs" on the underside of its foliage.  Either way, it is a wonderful addition to a landscape.  

Don't ignore the thorny plants.



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