Epiphytes: Air Plants & More

Ball moss is a common epiphyte & is typical
of what most people imagine when they
think "air plant." It attaches itself to a tree
& spends its life there.
 

Epiphyte derives from Greek epi- 'upon' and phyton 'plant'. An epiphyte is a non-parasitic, organism that grows on a plant and that derives moisture & nutrition from its surrounding ecosystem. Most people associate this with the terrestrial epiphytes or "air plants" that make their living without touching the ground, but wait, there's more...

Terrestrial epiphytes

Terrestrial epiphytes are plentiful where there is frequent rain or fog such as rain forests (both tropical and temperate) and also areas like Florida, especially near wetlands, but some epiphytes are also found in drier areas. They could be vascular flowering plants such as orchids, cacti, or bromeliads including ball moss & Spanish moss. They include vascular spore-producing plants such as ferns. Almost 10% of vascular plants are epiphytic.  Non-vascular, spore-producing plants such as mosses and club mosses are frequently epiphytes. 

Since epiphytic life can be precarious, many of these plants have fine hairs or waxy surfaces to trap or keep water. Some collect water in-between their leaves, but others have adapted to water shortages by using the CAM or C4 method of photosynthesis that can take place even when all their stomata (leaf pores) are closed to conserve water.

Lichens, which are not plants, but 3-way symbiotic organisms (fungi, algae, & bacteria), are also epiphytes when attached to plants. 

Strangler figs (Ficus spp.) are a special case: they are hemi-epiphytes when they begin life as a epiphyte high in the canopy, but when their aerial roots reach the ground, they are no longer epiphytes. It's a clever strategy, especially in rain forests where there is low light on the ground and the canopy is crowded. It's in the light when its young and it often takes over its host's spot in the canopy after strangling it by wrapping its roots around it.
(See below for more on terrestrial epiphytes.)

These barnacles, sessile animals (crustaceans),
attached to a kelp stipe (stem above the holdfast),
are marine epiphytes. 

Marine epiphytes

In the marine environment, plants, such as non-vascular seaweeds and vascular, flowering seagrasses, provide surfaces where sessile organisms can settle. Marine epiphytes include algae (micro & macro), bacteria, sponges, bryozoans, ascidians, protozoa, hydroids, crustaceans, & mollusks. They make their living from the nutrients and oxygen from the surrounding water, not from the plants. Sometimes, when there are too many epiphytes, the host plant may suffer from lack of light or lack of its own gas exchange.

Coonties: Florida's only native cycad & only Atala butterfly host plant

Coontie is a popular native for parking lots
like this hospital lot in Jacksonville, because it
doesn't need trimming to maintain this height.

Coontie (Zamia integrifolia), a beautiful & unique plant native to most of Florida & some Caribbean islands, has an interesting history of over exploitation & the near extinction of the Atala butterfly (Eumaeus atala) that depends on this plant as its larval food source. Today, coontie is widely planted in all of Florida because it's attractive, drought-tolerant, salt-spray tolerant, plus it grows in poor soil & does not need trimming. 

Coontie is a Cycad

Cycads are ancient plants that have a fossil record that shows that they have not changed much in the last 68 million years. They are gymnosperms, which means naked seed. (Pines are also gymnosperms.) Angiosperms, the flowering plants with their enclosed ovaries and their pollinators such as bees & butterflies developed much later. 

Cycads bear pollen and ovaries in fleshy cone-like structures at ground level on separate male and female plants. They are pollinated by beetles and the coonties use heat in the cones at different times to attract the beetles to the male cones and then to travel to the heat in the female cones. This is called thermogenesis.

Soil: We Need to Stop Treating it Like Dirt

Gardeners can improve their soil.

Why is soil important for gardeners?

We’ve all heard about growing the right plants in the right places so they’ll survive, but without healthy soil, your plants (even the right plants) will suffer or even die. So let’s look at what’s under our feet.

 (This article is an updated version of one I wrote for a garden blog several years ago, which is no longer available online.)

Healthy soil ecosystems are a complex interaction
 between bacteria, fungi, insects, & more.

Soil: the ecosystem beneath our feet

Soil found in native habitats is a complex ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, nematodes, earthworms, ants, salamanders, toads, insect larvae, moles, and more, all living in a substrate of minerals and humus. The minerals are a mixture of rocks, sand, silt, and/or clay. The humus or organic matter consists of fully or partially digested plant and animal parts. As humus is broken down into simple compounds, it provides a living for the decomposers, and eventually yields nutrients for plants. 

One gram (about 1/5 teaspoon) of healthy, non-poisoned soil could contain one hundred million bacteria, one million actinomycetes (a filamentous bacteria), and one hundred thousand fungi; if strung together, their filaments or hyphae would measure about 16 feet (5 meters) in length. This same gram of soil could also contain hundreds of nematodes living on the damp surfaces of the soil particles and maybe a few insect eggs or larvae and some earthworm cocoons. The exact proportions of each of these organisms will depend on soil conditions such as moisture, acidity, aeration, amount of humus, and the local plant community growing in the soil. 

A Quest for a Perfect Lawn: a Case Study

This graphic makes the point about how
out-of-step people are for trying to
maintain unnatural&unsustainable lawns.

To celebrate Earth Day, this post is about rethinking the "perfect" lawns, which are maintained with applications of fungicides, insecticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, and never allowed to go into seasonal dormancy. In Florida winter-dormant grasses are over-seeded with cool-weather grasses, irrigated through the dry season, & fertilized. 

Today's lawn expectations go way back to how European formal gardens & lawns around castles and manor houses were kept to show others how wealthy the owners were.

Today, lawn-"care" organizations can make lots of money by encouraging homeowners to have "perfect" lawns, but does it make sense or cents? As a botanist, naturalist, and a sustainable gardener, I would say, "NO!" 

There are so many reasons for replacing most of your lawn acreage with unpoisoned native habitat & pollinator gardens and then freeing the remainder of your lawn from all pesticides & synthetic fertilizers, mowing it less often at the highest setting, letting it go dormant in the winter & allow a variety of plants that tolerate mowing to grow there.

The Birds are NOT OK

What is the birds-eye view of your yard
your community?

Birds Aren’t Just Declining.
They’re Declining Faster!

Scientists studying data collected for more than three decades found accelerating losses. The steepest losses in the study, from 1987 to 2021, were seen in Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Arizona. This research offers clues about the causes. Here are links to a gift article in the NY Times that looks at this research and to a WashingtonPost gift article, which both cite the same study.

This research showed a correlation with increased use of pesticides in agricultural regions, but it also linked back to an older study showing that cats cause huge harm to our birds. I wrote about that as well and how controversial this is in this article.

This Red-shouldered Hawk provided its
opinion on how humans treat birds.

BUT...

Whatever the causes for their decline, we are NOT helpless and, as Joan Baez stated, "Action is the antidote to despair."

There are many actions we can take to make our yards and our communities more bird friendly. I've covered this topic from several different angles over the years, so I've gathered some of the most relevant articles here to make it easier for people to up their game at this critical time. The birds need us to act now more than ever.

Alders Fix Nitrogen

Smooth alder or hazel alder (Alnus serrulata)
Photos by Georgia Native Plant Society

Hazel alder or smooth alder (Alnus serrulata) is blooming now with its showy yellow catkins. The woody female flower heads look like little pine cones. It's a tall multi-stemmed shrub to small tree in the birch family (Betulaceae).

This alder is native to freshwater and brackish water wetlands from Texas to Maine and into North Florida. It plays an important role in these wetlands because it fixes nitrogen in its root nodules using Frankia, a genus of anaerobic, filamentous bacteria in the Actinomycetes order. 

When soil is wet all or most of the time it is anaerobic (without air) and in these conditions, the normal soil microbes cannot survive and most plants cannot obtain enough nutrients from this soil. The alders' symbiotic relationship with this weird bacteria provides the nutrients they need to survive and they do so without much competition from other plants.

Florida Betony

Florida betony develops ridged tubers that
look sorta like a rattlesnake tail and are edible.

Florida betony (Stachys floridana) is an aggressive perennial wildflower. Most botanists think that it was originally endemic to Florida, but now has spread to most of the Southeastern states from Virginia to Texas. It's a member of the mint family (Lamiaceae) and has the typical square stems and opposite leaves along the stems. The beautiful bilateral flowers range from whitish to purple arranged on a spike. It does best in damp soils.

The tubers are edible

It's also known rattlesnake weed because of its rattle-like tuber. Florida betony tubers are edible when harvested in the spring when they are firm and white, but only if the area has not been poisoned with lawn-care chemicals. They have the crispness of a water chestnut with a taste reminiscent of a very mild radish. Most people don't eat them later in the season when they turn tan or yellow and are not as crisp.

Sticks as Mulch

Using sticks as mulch reduces weed growth.

Mulches & mulching

Over the years, I've written about mulching and mulches in my seven books and in various articles: 
- Pine needle mulch (the most read post on this blog)
- Wood chip mulch 
- Too much mulch
- Rock-scaping & more.

But for the past several years, I've also been using sticks as mulch near buildings to reduce weed infestations. Unlike other mulching materials, there's a lot of air or space between the sticks, so there's nothing there for seedlings. Eventually, some weeds that spread via rhizomes or stolons, such as fog fruit (Phyla nodiflora) or Florida betony (Stachys floridana) work their way into the space, but very few seed-spread weeds. 

This type of mulching works well for our yard because have lots of trees. A good time to create a stick-mulch area is after a high-wind event. Yes, we also have several stick piles to create habitat for small birds and various insects, so I don't usually raid those piles for sticks for mulching. 

This year's roselle crop was amazing!

The roselle was almost as tall as the house.

This year's roselle (Sabdariffa gossypiifolia formerly Hibiscus sabdariffa) crop was amazing even though we were out-of-town for almost 2 months starting at the end of March and again for a month in midsummer. I planned for survival of the roselle shrubs during these trips in a couple of ways. 

- I'd planted them on the back (house-side) of a 10'-long swale and surrounded the area with several wire tomato cages to keep them upright and also to protect them from the deer. 
- The bottom of the swale had been enriched with several loads of kitchen scraps when the roselle shrubs still were small. (Read this article for details on composting in place.) 
- I'd planted tomatoes mostly to one side of the roselle bed, but then strung the sprawling tomato plants onto the front tomato cages. This was also to keep the deer away, because they do not favor tomatoes.
- Before we left on our trip in March, I placed the end of the rain barrel hose into the swale and left the rain barrel on a very slow drip. This way all the water from that downspout was used to irrigate the roselle. 
- Before we left on the second trip, I propped up the plants and tied them together to two 12' poles and to the house. 

Food-from-scraps

I prepare a whole row for come-again crops.
So far this year I have two starts: celery &
romaine lettuce.

Instead of throwing away or composting the bases of store-bought celery, cabbages, leaf lettuces, and other cool-weather crops, you can grow new food. The base must include a root-bearing zone. This is a fun project for kids, because you see results in just a few days.

As, I prepare wide rows for my fall and winter crops, I also prepare a food-from-scraps row. It's usually a fairly narrow row about a foot wide. First, I bury kitchen scraps and compost down the middle of the row and leave a shallow swale on the surface so that water stays in place and soaks into the soil. Then I mulch the row with pine needles. Here's link to my wide-row article for more detail & photos.

So far this year, I have two starts in this row, celery and romaine lettuce. Over the years, I have had the best success with celery, so much so, that I never plant it as a crop from seeds or plants. Cabbage has also been quite reliable and I end up harvesting the come-again cabbage leaves well before my regular cabbage crops mature.

Southern arrowwood, a pollinator & bird-friendly, easy-to-grow shrub

The beautiful flower heads attract a wide array
of pollinators, including this yellow
tiger swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus).

Southern arrowwood (Viburnum dentatum) should be planted more often. It’s a medium-sized shrub that attracts pollinators with its flowers and feeds birds with its blue berries in the fall. It's also the larval host for the spring azure butterfly (Celastrina ladon).  This is a wonderful choice to add habitat to your landscape. (See my article on habitat gardening.) 

It grows well in a variety of conditions, from full sun to partial shade, and a variety of soil types. It does best along pond edges and low areas, including rain gardens, but not where it’s really dry. It's low maintenance, once established, but it tolerates trimming.

It can be planted as part of a hedgerow or as part of a grove or thicket around trees with other native shrubs. It tends to sucker and spread by rhizome, so plan for this.

Coral honeysuckle creates habitat

The coral honeysuckle flowers are attractive
to us and to pollinaors, especially hummingbirds.

Coral honeysuckle, an easy-to-grow native for Florida and beyond.

Coral honeysuckle or scarlet honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) is native to most of eastern North America from eastern Texas to Massachusetts, including all but the southernmost counties in Florida. It's in the honeysuckle family Caprifoliaceae.

It has opposite leaves along each stem, but the leaves that subtend the inflorescence (flower head) are joined together. This is known as perfoliate leaves. 

The long tubular flowers, which are borne only on new wood, are especially favored by hummingbirds, but butterflies, bees, and moths also visit the flowers. After pollination, fruits, which are true berries, develop and are an important food source for many birds, especially the Northern Cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis). They also are the birds we seen most often nesting in the honeysuckle. 

The importance of Oaks

An oak branch in the white oak group

Oaks

Most oaks (Quercus spp.) are hardwood trees and have been used by people over the ages for building structures and boats. The oak fruit is a true nut with a hard shell and a cap, called the cupule, which protects the kernel. The kernel, which consists of two fatty seed leaves, called cotyledons, which surround a small embryo. This is an important food for wildlife and for early humans once they learned how to remove the bitter tannins.

Oaks are divided into two major groups. The white oaks are those with rounded lobes on their leaves and the acorns mature within one season and are less bitter. The red oaks generally have pointed lobes or sharp lobes on their leaves and their acorns stay on the trees for two seasons, so their acorns have more tannins and are therefore more bitter.

Sweetbay magnolia, a lovely tree with highly scented flowers

The beautiful sweetbay magnolia flower
is pollinated by beetles.

The sweetbay magnolia (Magnolia virginiana) is lovely, mostly evergreen medium-sized tree with leaves that are dark green on top with silver undersides. It has beautiful, fragrant flowers and bright red fruits. It is tolerant of flooding, even with brackish water. It grows best in acid soil in full sun or partial shade.

It provides excellent habitat for wildlife. While it's pollinated by beetles, a wide variety of birds and other wildlife consume the fruits, plus it's the larval food source for several butterflies including the Spicebush Swallowtail (Papilio troilus) and the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilo glaucus). It should be planted much more often.

Rain gardens in Florida

Stormwater carries pollutants that
end up in our waterways.

Why do we need rain gardens?

Sequestering stormwater reduces pollution of our waterways and of our aquifers. This is because stormwater runoff carries: fertilizers, sediments, plant matter, manures, pesticides, herbicides, salts, oils and other vehicular drippage. 

Pollution that originates from numerous, diffuse sources, such as our yards is called Non-Point-Source (NPS) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that NPS pollution is the largest threat to our waterways. But, we can reduce NPS pollution from our yards and from our communities by holding or sequestering more rainwater by installing rain barrels and by building rain gardens.

Miami's Underline Park

The Underline is an impressive
& well-used urban park located
under the Metro Rail in Miami.

Taking its inspiration from the High Line Park in New York City and The Lurie Garden in Chicago, The Friends of The Underline non-profit organization formed in 2013. The Underline is basically a multi-use path with parks, recreational spaces, playgrounds, plantings, and stormwater infrastructure. It's expected to extend to its full 10-mile distance by 2026.

These gardens feature untrimmed native plants that attract and feed insects and birds. This is different than traditional formal gardens where everything is tightly trimmed and exotic plants are chosen for their beauty and because they are not favored by the local insects. This style is left over from British and European upper class expectations where those who owned grand houses and estates favored those highly maintained gardens to show how wealthy they were.

How palms work

A cabbage palm tree (Sabal palmetto) silhouetted
by a sunrise on the St. Johns River.

Palms decorate tropical and subtropical regions of the World

Palms are monocots. Angiosperms or true flowering plants are divided into two major groups—monocots and dicots, which have various differences, but are named for the number of seed leaves or cotyledons they have. 

Monocots also include grasses, orchids, gingers, bananas, and bamboo. Also, most of the bulbs including onions, garlic, lilies, tulips, and more, but probably most important characteristic for our discussion on palms, there is no real wood with annual rings. The vascular tissue (the phloem and xylem) in monocots is arranged in bundles throughout the stem. In a dicot, they occur in the cambium layer just under or inside the bark around the plant stem. It is the new set of xylem and phloem cells that are produced each year which form the annual rings that produce the wood in true trees.

It's Time to Think Globally, but Act Locally.

www.climatewiselandscaping.com 

Climate change is real!

We are seeing its effects on the weather with more frequent, stronger and slower-moving hurricanes, more severe droughts, more fires, and rising sea levels. But Sue Reed and I did not debate the reality of climate change or what has caused these rapid changes when we wrote our award-winning book, "Climate-Wise Landscaping: Practical Actions for a Sustainable Future." Instead we said, "Let's roll up our sleeves and get to work."

The same thing has happened in the writing of my 7th book with the working title "Living Shorelines for Florida: A Practical Guide for Building Resilience," which will be published in 2025. I and my three coauthors did not debate sea level rise or discuss what the causes might be, but plans for dealing with rising sea levels are included in our various actions and designs for more resilient shorelines.

So what actions can we take and will it make any difference?

While actions we take in our yards and in our communities may seem insignificant, there are many millions of homeowners and communities, and together, we are a powerful force. What follows are some ideas and links to resources for some of the most significant actions. 

Two weeds: one native and one nonnative

While the sharp, hard spikes
 on the seeds hurt our feet and
embed themselves in the
lawnmower tires, this is their
method of dispersal. 

Sand spurs

Six species of sand spurs or sandburs (Cenchrus spp.) are native to Florida. They are true grasses in the grass family, Poaceae.  While native plants are highly recommended for sustainable, climate-wise landscapes, these are not desirable because of the hard and very sharp prickles that cover their seeds. 

They have volunteered in our yard only out by the road where the other plants in our freedom lawn are a bit more sparse and where the neighborhood dog walkers visit on a regular basis. So even though I have cleared out this population of annual plants before, new ones can get a start out there when dogs bring more seeds from elsewhere.

Grapes (Vitis spp.)

A muscadine grape (Vitis rotundifolia 'Alachua')
Credit: Ali Sarkhosh, UF/IFAS

Florida's grapes

There are six species of grapes that are native to Florida, while some have small ranges, grapes are found in all parts of the state. 

- Summer grape (Vitis aestivalis)
- Florida grape (Vitis cinerea var. floridana)
- Catbird grape (Vitis palmata)
- Muscadine (Vitis rotundifolia)
- Calloose grape (Vitis shuttleworthii)
- Frost grape (Vitis vulpina)

The muscadine grape is native to all of Florida and from Delaware to eastern Texas. This is grown as a sustainable crop in Florida and has been bred so that this normally dioecious plant (with separate male and female plants) is self-fertile or monoecious.