Nature's Calendar on a Fast Track

As we bask smugly in vintage Florida postcard weather this winter, let's pause for a moment to remember the roller-coaster ride of the previous two years:

• Early 2010 was marked by the coldest January in a century, including 10 straight nights of temperatures near or below freezing.
• The Summer of 2010 was the warmest on record for West Central Florida, with 151 days of temperatures that reached or exceeded 90 degrees.
• December 2010 was the coldest December on record, with not one but TWO early freezes.
• Summer 2011 was among the 10 warmest ever in West Central Florida.
• The mercury hasn't let up in this winter of 2011-2012, with no end in sight to the exceptionally mild temps we've had so far.

Everything in Nature happens for a reason, and so it is with the wild weather fluctuations. Blame it on our changing climate.

Winter surprise: Blanket flower (Gaillardia) still going strong

 I suspect not very many gardeners would argue that climate change isn't upon us. We see it with our own eyes. Flowers blooming earlier, leaves changing color later, or birds and butterflies coming and going sooner or later than expected. In my own garden, I've already had a few monarch butterflies hatching, my native Walter's viburnum is starting to produce its fragrant white flowers about two months early, and my red passion flower-- which normally dies back to the ground in winter - hasn't stopped blooming at all!

What winter surprises do you have in your garden? 

Passion vine in full bloom in January!!

Rather than call it Global Warming, a more accurate term is Climate Disruption, or simply Climate Change.The earth's climate overall is growing warmer (and ours in West Central Florida along with it), but the trajectory is not a straight line, but instead a meandering one with all sorts of extremes thrown into the mix. Record cold, record heat, more intense storms, floods and drought. Think of all the catastrophic, record-setting weather events of just the past year: the Japanese tsunami, the horrendous tornadoes in Missouri, Alabama and North Carolina; the earthquakes in Virginia and New Zealand; the unbelievable flooding from Hurricane Irene.

Never thought I'd see wild cotton
 in bloom this time of year

Gardeners, with their finely tuned powers of observation and love of nature, are perfect assistants for scientists studying the effects of climate change on plants and animals. That is why I am co-sponsoring, through my job with the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, a workshop to recruit gardeners and other interested people to participate in a program called Nature's Notebook. I took this workshop myself last year and loved it. As I walk around my yard, I note which of the plants in the national database that are in my yard are blooming or budding, or actively growing. 


Ditto for the birds, amphibians, insects and mammals that I see. I make note of the biological phase (singing, nesting, feeding, etc.) and then submit my observations online to the Nature's Notebook database, using simple electronic observation sheets. It's fun, easy and makes me feel like I am making a small but important contribution to scientific understanding of our natural world and how it is responding to our changing climate.


The workshop is Saturday, Feb. 11 from 9 a.m.- 2 p.m. at the Hillsborough County Extension Service. It is being taught by a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, one of the lead agencies in the Nature's Notebook partnership. 


For more information and to register, visit www.tbep.org


Hope to see some of my gardening pen pals there!

Warm welcome: A monarch just after emerging from its chrysalis this January

Not Quite Ready For Prime Time

Last year, the good folks in the City of Tampa Water Conservation Department asked me to be in a video about efficient lawn irrigation. Now, of course, we all know I do not have a sprinkler system -- heck, I don't even have a lawn! But they were convinced that I looked like just the sort of "average homeowner" they needed for this video. They even made it sound FUN.


In all honesty, it was fun -- despite the fact the outdoor filming took place in July and August -- what were they thinking? -- when I could literally feel the sweat running down my body and the makeup sliding off my face.

 This is a 30-minute video, so be warned! Feel free to fast forward until you find the  particular aspect of sprinkler system care and maintenance you want to know more about.

They gave me lots of great instruction and encouragement, and a very good teleprompter, and I did my best. We filmed at communities in New Tampa, which all seem to have large lawns and in-ground sprinkler systems and pretty high water use. I kept looking around and thinking about how wonderful it would be to create some layered landscape beds to replace some of the St. Augustine carpet. I loved it when they gave me a set of pruning shears to illustrate how to trim plants that are obstructing sprinkler heads. In fact, the pruning shears were really the only tool they gave me that I actually knew how to use. Despite appearances, I had never even seen a swing joint, flexible polytubing or a PVC saw before. Ask my husband, who is greatly amused by my apparent tool-savviness in the video.

Participating in the video reminded me of how important it is to water efficiently, no matter what your landscape. It is a fact that maintaining turfgrass generally requires more effort (and more water) than maintaining my grass-free xeriscape. But HOW you maintain your landscape is just as important as what KIND of landscape you have. A landscape with no grass at all can be a water hog if you have an automatic sprinkler system that isn't installed or programmed correctly. 


Among the most common problems I see with sprinkler systems are improperly placed sprinkler heads or rotors that water driveways, streets and sidewalks instead of vegetation (contributing to stormwater runoff) and missing or malfunctioning rain sensors. I also see many broken sprinkler heads -- they are easy to run over in a car -- and often the homeowners don't even know the head is gushing like Old Faithful because the system comes on while they are snoozing.


This video's for those people. Really, they are just like me. And if this persuades even one person to fix a leaking head, or move a spray rotor or even replace a section of turf with drought-tolerant plants, then I'll be proud.

By the way, did you remember to reset your irrigation timer when the time changed last weekend?

Scary Critters Are Haunting My Garden!

Since it's almost Halloween, when ghouls, ghosts and goblins are about, I thought it would be fun to look at a few of the fierce creatures I've found in my garden over the past year.


Leading off the Fright Parade has to be the gargantuan mama wolf spider I unearthed not long ago while cleaning out a plant bed. I immediately started shrieking, but somehow managed to refrain from bolting -- my typical spider reaction (see Blog Post titled "Confessions of a Spider Sissy"). When I calmed down, I noticed she was standing over a large egg sac, which she refused to leave even when my husband came running out in response to my screams, ready to squash her under his shoe. I could actually see her looking up at me warily, clearly ready to die to protect her precious eggs. You guessed it: I couldn't kill her. She was an expectant mother.

Instead, my husband brought me my camera, and I knelt down close enough to get this cool photo of her guarding her egg sac. For a severe arachno-phobic like me, this alone was a miracle. But when I backed away, she immediately crawled off the egg sac, dug a hole in the plant bed, came back, rolled the egg sac into the hole and then got inside herself, vanishing without a trace as she covered up the hole behind her.  All this happened in less than a minute, and it was one of the most amazing things I have ever witnessed. This spider may have changed my entire view of the species!


Last weekend I was reading the Sunday newspaper when what appeared to be a small wolf spider crawled across the page. Aha, I thought. I know your mother.

Then there was the beautiful black and yellow argiope that set up housekeeping last fall underneath our gutters on the back deck. My husband grew quite fond of the big girl and would occasionally toss a gift of a roach or beetle into her web. I read that argiopes are a common garden spider but, sadly, we haven't seen one this year.


Another fearsome insect that is common in my garden is the assassin bug.  Though they reputedly have a very painful bite, I leave them alone and they do the same to me.

Assassin bugs are named for their habit of lying in ambush for their prey, and then striking with startling speed and accuracy. They use their long "beak" to stab and inject a lethal toxin that dissolves their victim's innards so they can then suck up the liquified tissues. Oh the horror!


Fortunately the assassin bug eats many bad bugs, so best to live and let live.

Finally, let's end with my snakelike yard buddy, the glass lizard. Not a snake at all, but a true legless lizard, about 12-18 inches long, with tiny earholes and a remarkable ability to break off its own tail when captured -- thus the name "glass" lizard.  We have several of these fascinating creatures sharing our landscape, and they live underground most of the time. We see them in duff, hiding deep underneath mulch, and even in our compost bin, The compost-dweller became a familiar sight, since he apparently lived in our compost bin for several weeks, making quite a living feasting on spiders, beetles, grubs and other creepy-crawlies there. We saw him every week when we watered and turned the compost, until he finally ran out of food, I guess, and moved on.

 Now that I've given you a glimpse into my haunted garden, it's your turn. What's the scariest creature in yours? 

Beating Winter to the Punch

Readers of this blog will recall that it was the record-shattering freeze of January 2010 (remember the 10 straight freezing nights?) that launched us on our Extreme Yard Makeover. Like many folks, we lost darn near every plant in our yard. That's when we decided to "do it over, and do it right." 


And so we did. In addition to following the "right plant, right place" approach, we also embraced "right plant, right region." We wanted cold-hardy plants that would survive a North Tampa winter. Not only does this make sense, it saves cents -- as in not having to continually replace plants each spring. 

Beautyberry is a cold-hardy native that flourishes throughout the Southeast U.S.

It also saves us from having to dash around the yard wrapping and covering everything in our path on a cold night, when we'd rather be drinking hot chocolate in front of our fireplace.


Yet our attitude appears to be unusual, even in our own neighborhood. No doubt about it: residents of Tampa Bay love their tropicals!


We live in USDA Hardiness Zone 9A, though I often select plants from 9B as well. Anything below that is a no-go, unless it can grow in a container that can be moved inside during freezes. In fact, just to show I am not immune to the tropical allure, I recently purchased a stunning heliconia at the USF Fall Plant Sale. But I bought it expressly for a large container, and that is where it will stay. I can imagine, however, that my husband will have a few choice words for it -- and me -- when it comes time for us to tag team this hefty thing of beauty into the shed.


I was heartened to see that many of the vendors at the plant sale -- especially the Native Plant Society -- were actively promoting cold-hardy species. I bought two more rouge plants from them to go with the single lonely specimen I now have.

Ocala (yellow) anise is a cold-weather champion.
When crushed, its leaves smell like -- you guessed it -- anise.

We may not always have winter freezes, but I'm not betting against them. We are in a period of intense climate disruption, and on our way to overall warmer temperatures we are seeing wild extremes in climate. 


A major motivation for our landscape makeover was to save time. In the Spring, we'd rather be fishing or cycling than planting. And we sure don't want to have to keep shelling out our hard-earned money for new plants over and over again. 


Yet the lure of tropicals is so strong for many of us - why is that? All of Florida is certainly not Miami, yet to look at the most common landscaping plants here you'd think it was. Sago and royal palms, ti plants, crotons, and bougainvilleas abound. And none can tolerate freezing temperatures for long. Some can't even take temperatures in the mid-40s -- and you can be sure we will see those every winter.


Of course, there are always exceptions. Cold-sensitive plants grown along a fence, with a southern exposure, may do fine. Ditto for plants grown under the insulating warmth of an oak's canopy. This is where "right plant, right place" comes back into play. We were amazed at the way our large live oak served as a natural blanket for everything in our front yard. This is why our dracaena marginata tricolor, a definite tropical, flourishes there.  Only the threesome on the very perimeter of the oak canopy showed any cold damage at all last winter, and then it was very little. Yet another reason to salute live oaks!

Our tri-color dracaenas are now 4 feet tall and
 quite happy under the shelter of our  large live oak

Some of our choices are marginal for our hardiness zone, but experience has shown they will come back strong even after dying back completely over the winter. Wild coffee is one of those, as is firebush. We can live with them getting whacked every winter because we know they'll "Spring" right back. 


But the vast majority of the landscape is cold-hardy, for a reason. We learned our lesson in 2010. 

The distinctive Weeping Yaupon Holly makes a lovely small specimen tree 

Specimen trees like East Palatka and Weeping Yaupon hollies; foundational shrubs like Ocala anise, beautyberry, coontie and blue-stem saw palmetto; and groundcovers like bulbine, evergreen liriope and asiatic jasmine, take everything Old Man Winter can throw their way. Even flax lily and chenille plant, used extensively as groundcovers in our garden, weather the cold with little damage, indicating that there is some wiggle room with those hardiness zones depending on the specific conditions in which they are grown.


All it takes is a little thought, and planning -- and maybe a bit of luck as well -- to beat winter to the punch! 

Seeing Familiar Friends in a New Light

While bicycling recently on the beautiful Withlacoochee Trail, I was treated to the spectacular sight of masses of native dotted horsemint in full bloom on either side of the trail, which runs 46 miles through the Withlacoochee State Forest. When it blooms in such profusion, horsemint is a showstopper. Ironically, I hardly even notice it the rest of the year, even in my own garden.

Muhly grass in bloom is a thing of beauty

The same is true for many of the fall bloomers in my yard. Take muhly grass, another native readily adaptable to home landscapes. Without its spectacular feathery pink plumes it just looks like a rather unkempt clump of tall grass. Handsome, yes. A head tuner? Not so much.  But when it blooms, as mine is finally doing, it demands your attention! I have been looking forward to its debut for weeks.

Ditto for my cassia shrubs, which are just now setting those bright yellow flower clusters that will keep blooming right though winter. Or the native yellowtop wildflowers shown below, also resplendent with golden crowns.

Even the very drab native poinsettia, which pops up unbidden all over my butterfly garden, looks truly lovely with its delicate red face. This Florida version of Indian paintbrush brings some early holiday cheer to the garden!

But this year's award for impressive fall color has to go to my narrowleaf (swamp) sunflowers.They are at glorious peak bloom right now, helped by last weekend's slow, soaking rains, and they are fully 12 feet tall. Indeed, in the many years I have grown this native wildflower, I have never seen it reach such towering heights. Giant sunflowers, yes, but this native wildflower species, no. Perhaps its astounding growth is a result of the abundance of rainfall at my home this summer. Maybe it's my compost-enriched soil. Who knows? But these yellow flowers are soaring above my 6-foot back fence like giraffes. 

Narrowleaf sunflowers towering over my 6-foot fence

I have even had neighbors walking by my house comment on them. I had to stake and tie them to the fence just to keep them from toppling over!

I like to cut the sunflowers and put them in vases in my house -- although short-lived, they brighten up any space. As you can imagine, I practically need a javelin to reach them this year. 

A nursery grower who raises swamp sunflowers told me I can keep them from getting so out of control next fall by pruning them in mid-July. This will limit their growth to a reasonable 5 or 6 feet, while still allowing plenty of time for the flower buds to form.

Definitely a game plan for next year. In the meantime, I'll continue to marvel at my "sunflowers on steroids" and hope that my back yard isn't cited for interference with commercial air space! 


What familiar friends do you look forward to seeing anew in the fall in your garden?

Tour of Native Landscapes

This past weekend I went on a tour of native plant landscapes sponsored by the Pinellas Chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society. This annual event is a self-guided tour of homes featuring all or mostly native plants. The tour is two days -- with South Pinellas homes on Saturday and North Pinellas locations on Sunday. Last year I did the South Pinellas tour -- this year I decided to see what homeowners in North Pinellas are up to, figuring that their climate, soils and plant selections would be more similar to my Tampa landscape.


On any garden tour, It's always inspiring to see what clever, creative ideas other gardeners are implementing that I might want to "borrow" myself. I always take photos to jog my memory later when I'm looking for an interesting planting scheme or a new way to use yard art.


This tour has the special twist of featuring an amazing variety of native plants -- most of which, sadly, can be only be purchased from a native plant nursery or grown from cuttings or seeds bestowed by generous native-loving friends (which is how I got most of my more unusual natives).


I tend to prefer landscapes with structure and design, and I found plenty to like on the North Pinellas tour, like this inviting natural path in a Clearwater back yard lined with firebush, beautyberry, tropical sage and ironweed.

I was also captivated by the charming seating area at this home, framed by an arbor bursting with coral honeysuckle, a favorite nectar source of hummingbirds.

Water features were present at almost all the homes. I loved this waterfall cascading down to a quiet pool bordered by ferns, salvias and other overhanging plants that give it a lush, tropical feel.

Or this large, beautyberry-fringed pond at a Safety Harbor home.

At the tour stop in Oldsmar, I admired the way the owners blended the natural vegetation -- pines and palmettoes -- with unusual natives like Lizard's tail and even exotics like crinum lilies and orchids. The landscape islands were bisected by a beautiful, curving brick walkway.

Who wouldn't want to sit here and just enjoy the scenery?

Or wander down the brick walkways and explore some more?

Yard art aficionado that I am, you know I honed right in on these whimsical little slippers planted with lovely native wood violets.

I don't think my own yard will ever be entirely native -- there are just so many wonderful non-native but Florida-adapted choices available -- but I love mixing the natives into my garden. They can't be beat for toughness and resilience, and our native butterflies and birds often prefer or even require them. As time goes on, I am bringing more natives, especially wildflowers like this dotted horsemint, into my landscape, joining the tropical sage, scorpion tail, mistflowers and narrow-leaved sunflowers in my Bay-Friendly plant palette.

The Fruits of our Labor

Labor Day is the perfect time for all of us to put down the trowels and shovels, grab an ultra-cold glass of iced tea, take a comfy seat on our porches and patios, and just admire the fruits of our labor -- our beautiful gardens. 

In the Bay-Friendly Landscape, the lushness of summer is still evident. Our yard has grown dramatically this year, thanks to abundant rain. We have not provided any supplemental water in at least two months. My primary chore this summer has been pruning, and pruning, and pruning again. 

Butterflies and moths continue to visit, although their numbers are now tapering off. Sulphurs are the most abundant now, and their caterpillars are keeping the cassias nicely in check.

Sulphur caterpillar munching cassia

Recently, we have been serenaded in the evenings by an extremely loud cicada orchestra. I was lucky enough to see one of these gigantic, pop-eyed insects on the ground, presumably right after emerging as an adult in its winged state. But not lucky enough to have my camera with me, unfortunately. 

Can anyone identify this moth -- perhaps a duskywing? It was feeding on the native mistflowers.

The lovely carefree caladiums are still going strong, their happy faces lining our front walkway by the funny antique sink that we use as a bird bath. 


Fall is showing its colors already, in the festive purple beads draping the beautyberries, in the first feathery pink plumes on the muhly grass, and in the berries popping out on the East Palatka hollies. 


As if they are running out of time,the chaste tree is sending up a furious shower of violet blossoms, and the majestic beauty hawthorne is putting out an unexpected second bloom. 


Everywhere, things are happening, growing, changing. 


But I'm just going to sit here for a while, quietly, and do nothing. It is Labor Day, after all.