There Were No Fences

  I explore the complex world of seeds and germination in my book, The Nature of Plants: An Introduction To How Plants Work, published in both print and audible form by the University of Florida Press.  I am now teaching a short course on propagation and it reinforces to me, once again, how little most plant loving people know about seeds and plants in general - so I thought I'd share a bit here. To start, seeds are not "inert".  They are quite alive and a lot is going on within them.  If I choose to be a vegetarian because I abhor the cruelty that the meat industry presents to animals. I might also say the same about what we do to plants.  In reality, why are plants any different from animals?  The more we know about them, the more we realize that they face the same challenges that animals do; they just express their feelings in ways that most of us cannot "hear". This lima bean has sat in a jar - either at a store or storage locker likely for months or ye...

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 f...

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...

  Nearly six months ago, Jane and I set a dilapidated small dresser out on our front porch with the intention of eventually getting it over to a local secondhand store, but we procrastinated and it started to fall apart.  About the same time, I noticed that it had been taken over by a colony of honeybees.  They've been fun to watch these past months and, although we have no intention of trying to harvest honey, my thought was that they would play an important part in pollinating our wildflowers in late fall and early winter when the native bees had called it quits for the year.  My scaleleaf aster ( Symphyotrichum adnatum ) in particular always blooms so late that I do not get viable seed and I've always wanted to add this species to what I can offer others. The honeybee in the photo above is nectaring on a late-summer aster ( S . lateriflorum ) so it made sense to me that they would use the scaleleaf as well.  They haven't touched it, however. Over the course o...