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! 

I'm Livin' in Shame

So I have to admit something, and it's something that's pretty embarrassing. So embarrassing that it's kept me from writing a new post in well over a month. But I think it's time to get this off my chest, get it out in the open and start figuring out a way to deal with it. So, are you ready? Here it is:

We seem to have lost My Florida Backyard.

Summer invaded, and this year, we let it win. The invaders, led by the Spanish (Needle) have completely taken over, and we just haven't had the energy or enthusiasm to do anything about it.

It started out slowly, but quickly picked up speed once August hit. See, the problem is, I actually work as a gardener. Once you're forced to spend hours a day out in the hot sun pulling weeds for a paycheck, it's suddenly just not as much fun to maintain your own garden, especially during the horrible hot days of a Florida summer.

It makes me incredibly sad, so sad that I have only been in the backyard about three times over the last month. I just can't stand to see it this way, but I can't seem to find the energy to go out and get sweaty and dirty on my precious days off. So, the garden has disappeared into a horrid mess of weeds and overgrowth.

But while we're feeling pretty overwhelmed right now, we haven't given up hope. We definitely plan to rescue My Florida Backyard, just as soon as some pleasant fall days arrive. In a lot of ways, it will be fun. There are certain places where we pretty much have to start from the ground up, and we can choose new plants and create new garden themes and all kinds of fun stuff. We just want to do it when the sun isn't quite so hot, and the humidity isn't quite so high, and the mosquitoes aren't quite so savage. But My Florida Backyard will certainly rise again.

Because the wildlife is still there, and we still love it. So we'll be back in action again when Florida's great fall and winter weather starts to kick in. That's a promise. Until then, you won't hear much from us, most likely. But be sure to hang around and come back once things get going... because someday soon My Florida Backyard will be better than ever!

Beautiful Surprise

After seeing them in another garden, I knew My Florida Backyard needed Gloriosa Lilies (Gloriosa superba), so I ordered some from an end-of-season sale at American Meadows in late spring. Gloriosa Lilies grow from tubers, and we received and planted three. Two of them have grown and done well, though we've had an interesting surprise from the blooms.

One of the tubers produced the expected fiery red blooms accented with yellow, exploding in the fantastical upside-down bloom shape so unusual in a flower.

Amazing as these flowers are, we were actually more astonished by the flowers from the other root. While Gloriosa Lily flowers start pale in color and deepen to red as they open, these flowers stayed pale, taking on only a dark pink hue as they aged. This happened with every bloom from that tuber, so it wasn't a one-time thing.

We can't really find any other descriptions of this on the web, so we're not sure if this is a common mutation or not. It's certainly not something we've ever seen before. If you know any more about this unusual Gloriosa Lily bloom, please do drop us a line in the comments.