Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
Exit 207 and I-95, St. Augustine, Florida. Awesome soilless vertical food garden, supplying vegetables, strawberries, herbs and more. So let me ask you, is a strawberry a fruit or is a strawberry a vegetable? Right! A strawberry is neither. Rather the red plumpness is a pseduo-fruit, forming part of the stem holding the the seeds [...]
Ruairi, my lanky teenage son with blue braces and I decide to plant flats of Allium canadense on one of my favorite living roofs tonight. I set out promptly planting while Ruairi totes numerous trays up the winding spiral stairwell, both of us focusing on the unhealthy sub sandwich we are going to eat after [...]
Florida’s coastal sand dunes provide a wonderful opportunity to study native plants who may be suited for green roofs in hot, dry and windy climates. We will be working with the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens on a spectacular native plant green roof soon, I need some fresh, new plant perspectives and know where to go [...]
Many folk have an opinion as to what a native plant is. As a botanist and a lawyer by education, I typically use Aristotelian logic/reasoning to satisfy myself when answering a question. My world view is centered around the classical world. But I am trying to shake that up a bit. Get rid of the [...]
What if we were to treat every square inch of our landscapes with respect? In Part 1: Soils, I illustrated that wildlife gardening starts with respecting soils and minimizing soil compaction, degradation and disturbance. PART 2: WATER Water is not infinite. I think many of us think of the water cycle as a closed loop. If [...]
July is always killer in the Florida garden. July is double killer on Florida Green Roofs. So I was breaking into a sweat, not so much from the heat but from the humidity this morning on the Breaking Ground (BGC) Green Roof as we worked with nine next generation Green Roof youths, studying the importance [...]
The original topic for June’s post centered around a discussion of the definition of a native plant. The topic may have been visited and revisited until it can be thought of as old news, yet on a recent Caribbean island green roof project I was asked to look at using primarily native plants. Natives were [...]
We are almost finished with the initial wave of plantings on the Jacksonville, Florida’s Breaking Ground Contracting Green Roof. Our focus was multifold. Working with the Breaking Ground team, Catherine Burkee, Mary Tappouni and others, we developed a Mission Statement for the Green Roof project. The Mission Statement for the Living Roof defines Breaking Ground [...]
The moon is waxing and still low in the sky over Jacksonville, as Fox 30 news prepares to broadcast from the Breaking Ground Contracting Living Garden Roof this morning. Traffic is starting to build on the adjacent I-10 and the air is thick with humidity, a sign we may finally see brief some rain after [...]
