Who Are You?

UPDATE: I posted this to the Tampa Audubon Society Facebook page and received this helpful response from David Bowman:
"Female or young Pine Warbler. Not all Pine Warblers are as bright yellow as the adult male you have in the comparison picture. Palm Warblers would have a noticable eye stripe, rufous crown , and yellow rump."

This is our first documented Pine Warbler in My Florida Backyard!

Original Post:
Calling all birders! I need help with an ID, please.

I was looking back at a post from earlier this year, and one of the bird photos I posted caught my eye. I had initially labelled it a Yellow-Rumped Warbler (Setophaga coronata), but at a second look, the yellow head is making me question myself. I'm wondering if instead this could be a Pine Warbler (Setophaga pinus). Muted winter coloration always makes identification more difficult, and this isn't the best picture, but if you have an opinion to offer, I'd love to hear it. This photo was taken in Tampa, FL in late October, 2012.

My Photo:

A Photo of a Pine Warbler:
(Photo credit: Dominic Sherony via Wikimedia Commons)

Right Where I Belong

Last Tuesday, I teased you with some mystery flowers in my Home Depot shopping cart. I certainly didn't intend for it to take a week for me to get back to you with the answer, but isn't it funny how life just gets away from you? Work, errands, holiday planning, more work... well, anyway, I finally found time to plant my precious flowers and now I proudly present to you my very favorite Florida native wildflower: Tampa Mock Vervain (Glandularia tampensis)!

Not every town has a flower named after it, but Tampa does, and it's a lovely one at that. Endemic to just a handful of counties along the western coast of Florida, Tampa Mock Vervain is endangered mostly due to habitat loss. Fortunately, it's generally available at Bay area Home Depot stores this time of year, as well as at just about any local native plant nursery. It will bloom happily until the hot summer hits around June, so now is the time to plant it. (Learn more about Tampa Mock Vervain in this post from last year.)

It's been extraordinarily dry here for the last six weeks or so, with virtually no rain and none in the forecast either.  Although Tampa Vervain is drought-tolerant, it will flower best with regular water, so I decided to plant mine in containers this year. That way, I have more control over the watering and can effectively use what's left in our rain barrel before resorting to the hose. I found these little rock planters on clearance at the end of the summer and have been looking for a good chance to use them, so this is perfect timing!

So why do I love Tampa Vervain so much? Aside from the glorious purple flower clusters (I can never capture the color just right with my camera) and the fact that planting it helps support an endangered species named for the city where I live? Well, the answer to that is easy...

Butterflies love it! Really, there's no downside to this plant. It deserves a place in every cool-season butterfly garden in Central Florida... and My Florida Backyard is happy to have it once again!

Tuesday Trivia: What's In My Cart?

I took a break from a marathon Christmas shopping trip this afternoon to see what was new at my local Home Depot nursery. I wasn't going to buy anything (I swear!), until I spotted a sea of light purple from afar and went running over to see if it could possibly be what I thought it was. And it was! I quickly loaded the cart:

Know what it is? It's my favorite Florida native wildflower, and this is the time of year when you can find it for sale. If you can't ID it, come back this weekend when I'll be posting about planting it and a few other things! Happy guessing!

Wordless Wednesday: Purple Haze

Carolina Climbing Aster (Aster carolinianus)

In Bloom

We've finally replanted the butterfly garden, and although it still really needs a new layer of mulch, at least the plants are in and doing well.

The key to a good butterfly garden is including both host plants and nectar plants. For the nectar plants, using different colors and heights is also effective, and grouping plants together in clusters of colors gives a nice aesthetic and the bugs seem to like it too. To perk up the garden for the cooler months, here are the plants we added:

Salvia farinacea 

Pentas lanceolata in red...

and pink.

Agastache foeniculum

Lavendula pinnata

And of course, plenty of milkweed, both red and yellow flowering.

It's nice to have a backyard full of color again, and on warm afternoons the butterflies are definitely enjoying it. It's good to be getting My Florida Backyard back into the swing of things again!

Affair of the Necklace

We're just about done cleaning out the weeds of summer from My Florida Backyard. The butterfly garden has been replanted (more on that soon), and in other areas we've found thing weren't as bad as we feared. We've even found a few plants we forgot we had, like this Necklacepod (Sophora tomentosa var. truncata).

It's a Florida native we found last year and tucked away in a corner of the garden. It must have bloomed this summer, since we found some of the fun seed pods that give the plant its name. We're sad that we missed it, since the photos of the flowers we found on the internet are really cool. The pods are fun too, though.

This plant is actually a shrub that can grow up to 10 feet or so. It's native to Florida, and grows in zones 9 - 11. It's salt-tolerant and can often be found near or on the coast. There is a non-native species, Sophora tomentosa var. occidentalis, which has much fuzzier, silvery leaves and is native to the West Indies, so if you're seeking this plant out at a native plant nursery, make sure they're selling you the correct type.

Next year we hope to catch this plant when it's blooming, since the flowers are said to be great for butterflies. In the meantime, we're just glad we managed to find it again here in My Florida Backyard.

Back in the Game

The air is fresh and clean, the sky is clear and blue, and it's time to venture out into My Florida Backyard again! So far, all we've done is pull some weeds, but it's made enough of a difference that we can finally admire the autumn splendor of Muhly Grass and Winter Cassia.

  

Much better than when I did my last post, right? There's still a lot of work to be done, but it's nice enough that we can spend a little time out there without feeling sad and a little embarrassed. And just in time, too, since migrating birds like these little Yellow-Rumped Warblers (Setophaga coronata) are starting to make their way back south for the winter.

And pulling weeds does reveal the occasional surviving gem, like the tiny delicate blooms of Georgia Calamint (Calamintha georgiana), still hanging on in one corner of the butterfly garden.

So there's a lot to look forward to in the months ahead. And as soon as this wind leftover from Crazy Storm Sandy (as I've started calling it) dies down a little...

... it'll be time to get busy in the gardens again. First up, hopefully this weekend, is the butterfly garden. Just look at all the room we have for new plants!