Why talking about native plant landscapes is so important

Consumers are presented with this array of mostly
nonnative plants in full bloom to plant so their yards can
decorated with plants at peak bloom all the time.

Where are the native plants?

New homeowners and beginning gardeners find displays similar to this photo that I took at a big box store a few years ago. It's filled with mostly nonnative annuals in full bloom. Each tray is not too expensive, but after they fade in a couple of months, people are expected to come back to replace them with the next set. 

Examples in garden magazines and gardening TV shows with their instant landscapes imply that garden installations are events, and not ongoing projects that develop over the years.

The hand of the gardener in native landscapes

Plant more natives!

In 2013, a volunteer beautyberry shrub near the edge of the
lawn is surrounded by several water oaks.

Ecologists and environmental organizations have been urging people to plant more native plants, to build bird-friendly and pollinator-friendly habitat, and to do this by removing at least some of their lawn.

One prime example is Doug Tallamy's HomeGrown National Park where you can register your yard to be part of of this park by replacing at least half of the lawn with native plants.

This is great and I hope that millions of homeowners and other property managers take this step to build native habitat, but there are some important steps to take, especially in urban and suburban areas, to increase the acceptability of these native landscapes. Our yards and our community landscapes, even if they have a good portion of native plants are not wild spaces and will need some regular care. (Actually, I wrote a book on this topic. See below.)

Removing invasive plants costs Florida $45 million per year

Mimosa tree (Albizia julibrissin),
a Category I invasive in all of Florida.

Yet, many of these plants are still for sale

How did we get into this situation?

A few hundred years ago, once world travel was readily available, many plants and animals were transported from their native habitats where natural checks and balances evolved over millennia so that predator & food sources were in balance. (I will be talking about plants in this post, but invasive animal species are also a huge problem in Florida.) 

People moved thousands of plant species for a number of reasons:
- to bring food crops with them as they settled into new places.
- they collected beautiful plants from around the world to plant in gardens as a novelty or for prestige.
- Some plants were imported for their utility such as stopping erosion (such as kudzu (Pueraria montana)) or building fast-growing hedges (such as, Brazilian pepper (Schinus terebinthifolia)).
- Many non-native plants have been favored in the landscaping industry because most local insects and other critters do not feed on them, so they are easier to grow and sell, because they "look good."
and...
- Sometimes the plants were introduced to new regions by accident as hitchhikers with other plants or with other products that were being transported.

What is "invasive" and how is that status determined?

Speaking up for our only planet

Show & tell! I bought this nandina to make
the point that Florida is spending millions
to remove invasive plants, but many of them
 are still for sale, which makes the problem
even worse. I asked them to make it illegal
to sell known invasives. 

The 2019 Clay County Delegation meeting was October 10 at 2:30pm

Each fall in Florida, there are state delegation meetings in every county where people can address their Florida legislature representatives. I'd called my senator's office more than a month earlier to put myself on the agenda. You have only three minutes to make your point, so I'd planned out my topics and had put together a handout to give to the legislators with my points and links for more information. (See my handout below.) This is necessary, because people might be distracted with side conversations that may come up during the hearing. I print my handouts on green paper.

Ramping up for fall

Ginny event poster

Book tour

This fall can be best described as frenetic. I now have 29 public events and 5 private ones from Sept. 1 through Nov. 10th.  Can you believe that I'm working a arranging a couple more? I'll have 4 or 5 different presentations. Check out my Appearances Page to see the updated list.

This poster was created by the Cocoplum Florida Native Plant Society Chapter for the 3-hour native plant workshop that they organized and that I'll be leading on Oct. 10th in Stuart, FL.

Winter: a good time to remove invasive plants

Wedelia or creeping oxeye daisy (Sphagneticola trilobata): a beautiful invader. 

Less lawn...

When we moved into our house here in North Florida, we let several areas of lawn grow out. I've written about this several times. See From lawn to woods: a retrospective, for what has happened out front.

Here's the other half of the story. Our 1.5 acre lot is long and pie-shaped. Out back is a narrowing strip to the lake. We decided early on that we'd not continue to mow this whole area and just leave a pathway that could be mowed with one trip down and one trip back on the riding mower. The area opens up by the lake, so there is more  mowing to do down there.

Spaghetti squash recipes & planting

A store-bought spaghetti squash contained a bunch of sprouted seeds.
How long had it been sitting there in the store?

I was craving a spaghetti squash, so we bought one. The rind seemed unusually hard and quite a number of the seeds had sprouted. I try not to waste squash seeds of any kind, so if I'm not saving them for growing, I prepare them for eating. In this case I planted some of the sprouted seeds, dried 20 or so for future planting, and the rest I fixed for snacking.

Terrible taro and other invasives

The taro removed from the bulkhead garden.

Removing invasives, sooner rather than later

Just this last April, we redid this weird bulkhead space to fix a slumping problem. At the time, I thought I'd removed all the taro roots and corms (Colocasia esculenta) and the soil we used to fill in the space was from another area of the property with no taros. So in just these few months, they've rebounded. I pulled this whole bouquet from this space which is approximately 4' x 4'.  I'll have to check for new growth more often. I also pulled out some native elderberry  (Sambucus nigra subsp. canadensis) volunteers, which are small trees.

Note on taro (aka dasheen): it was brought from Africa by slaves and then again in 1910 by the US Dept. of Agriculture as a potato substitute for the south. Big mistake. Several people suggested that we include it as a crop in "Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida," but I refused. If it's invasive, we should not be encouraging people to grow it. Another interesting feature of this plant as a crop, is that every part contains calcium oxalate crystals, which can irritate your mouth and other tissues. To prepare the corms to eat, you have to boil it in at least three waters and then grind it to a powder.

Removing lawn and other adventures

Clearing the rest of this section of lawn.

Digging grass...

After putting it off for some time now, I finally finished removing the lawn in front of the shed. I started removing this part of the lawn last fall when I planted the coreopsis. My post on fall seedlings shows the beginning of this project.

It's not an easy task to rip up well-established turfgrass, but I was side-tracked numerous times.

Fixing a slumping problem

We carefully propped the cement blocks to keep the barrier cloth right
next to the cement wall.

Slumping fix

We live on a lake and have an oddly-shaped section of bulkhead between our boat-lift bay and the neighbor's cement bulkhead. The soil here has been eroding from under the bulkhead and from its edge next to the cement. We've filled it a few times in the 10 years we've been here, but soil keeps disappearing.

So this time, we got serious. We removed the 2 maple saplings, a bunch of invasive wild taro, the canna lilies that I'd planted a couple years ago (which I saved for replanting) and an assortment of other weeds. We can't allow the maples to grow here because they'd destroy the bulkhead. We dug down deep to remove all the roots. Much of the soil from the bottom was pure, slimy clay. We could have made some pretty pottery with its natural colors of tan, yellow, and orange, but we put it to better use...

Harvest-directed cooking

I love this time of year because so much of what we eat comes from the garden. It's harvest-directed cooking.

A dinner salad from the garden includes a rogue blooming onion*, Swiss chard, 3 types of lettuce from the chef's mix blend, romaine, curly parsley, carrots, sugar-snap peas, come-again broccoli, garlic chives, meadow garlic, rosemary, dill, and cabbage leaves.

Further lawn reduction, more edible garden space, and zebra longwings!

Zebra longwing on tropical sage.

Florida's State Butterfly

This year we’ve had a huge jump in population of Zebra longwing butterflies (Heliconius charithonia). Our property is aflutter with all their striped glory.  They don’t have deep wing beats like a lot of floppy butterflies–their wings hardly move as they fly.  They are skittish compared to some other butterflies, but they are mesmerizing.

This is Florida’s state butterfly and deservedly so, there are more sitings in this state than others. The larval food is the passion vine (Pasiflora spp), but they like it best when it’s grown in the shade.

I’ve been trying for years to create a welcoming habitat for the zebra longwings, so finally we’ve reached the point where this could happen and now we’re teeming with zebras. Continue reading my post over on Beautiful Native Plants blog, Teeming with Zebras.

Ferns, Yucca, Beautyberry, Snow Squarestem, and a Recipe

Ferns create a soft edge between the woods and the lawn.

Ferns

I've always loved ferns in the landscape. It's just so relaxing not to have to worry about whether there will be nice flowers and that their color coordinates with others. With ferns, there are never any flowers, so I can just enjoy their fernyness in the landscape.

Read my post "Ferns in the landscape" over on the Beautiful Native Plants blog to see some of my ferns and to learn about their two-stage life cycle.

Tuberous swordfern (Nephrolepis cordifolia) is tremendously invasive in Florida.  I've removed bushels of them from our property, but many more bushels to go.

Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) is blooming now: unbelievably purple berries to follow. This native shrub is in the mint family and is a favorite of birds in the winter. People make jellies and jams from the berries, but I'd rather feed the birds.

Yucca (Yucca aloifolia) bloom in the morning sunlight. This plant is part of our mailbox garden and the spike with the bloom is ten feet tall! There are a lot of these yuccas in the neighborhood, but they bloomed a month ago including one that is a clone of this plant. Weird.

Mediterranean pasta salad. The recipe is flexible and is a great way to use up whatever you have on hand. This rendition included these items from the garden: the last of my cabbage, tomatoes, green onions, sweet onions, cucumber, garlic chives, chives, Greek oregano and curly parsley. The pesto dressing included sweet onions, garlic chives, garlic, Greek oregano, curly parsley, and dollarweed. The recipe is on page 171 of "Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida."

The first snow squarestem (Melanthera nivea) flowers of the season appeared last week. The beautiful pollinator parade has begun! Here's my post on this very-easy-to-grow pollinator plant: Snow squarestem: a bee & butterfly magnet.

Dawn's early light on July 5th from my front yard. Many of the neighbors went crazy with their personal fireworks the previous evening, even though it was pouring rain.

Enjoy the summer in your yard, but garden early in the day to avoid heat stroke!


Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

Winter Solstice and more...

The Mayan Calendar ends 12/21/12 6:12 am EST.

Winter solstice has been a cause for celebration (both pagan and religious) since man's earliest days for now is when the days start to get longer. And isn't that reason enough?

This year the day has new meaning, though, since the experts tell us that the Mayan calendar, which has been in effect for more than 5,000 years, will end.

Over on the Florida Native Plant Society blog, I posted a plea to plant a tree, because when you plant a tree, you believe in the future. So if the world does not end as predicted, it will have been because all those gardeners planted so many trees that the future just had to be there for them.

Arbor Day Foundation & Florida...

The Arbor Day Foundation has played a big part to help people, cities and towns plant more trees since 1865 when J. Sterling Morton started this foundation.

In Florida alone there are 165 Tree Cities. We've discussed this organization in these previous posts: Florida's Arbor Day: Third Friday in January and our followup post on our members' favorite trees: Your Favorite Trees.  So yes, The Arbor Day Foundation has done a lot to increase awareness of the importance of trees even in urban and suburban environments and presents a lot of good educational material.

BUT... is this organization doing more harm than good? 

Read more on my post over on the Florida Native Plant Society blog.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt

Not more queen palms!

A restaurant wins a landscape award with its queen palms, but why?

The St. Augustine Beach Tree Board and Beautification Advisory Board for landscaping awarded this restaurant with their Best Commercial category. See the article in the St Augustine Times, The Groove landscape wins honor.