Watching the Gardens Evolve: Florida Scrub Skullcap

Sometimes I really irritate myself.  When I went to look for a picture of how an area of the garden looked when we first planted it earlier this spring, I realized that I had taken exactly zero closeup photos.  I remember thinking that the garden looked much too bare to be worth photographing.  Good grief - SURELY by now I would know how much fun it is to watch the evolution of growing things throughout the seasons!

Anyway, here is the best I can do:  a greatly enlarged (and therefore fuzzy) "closeup" of one corner of my newly planted front flower beds, taken on April 17th of this spring....

I want you to notice the 3 plants that are right at the corner, in the center of the photo.  The tall, rather leggy plant is Ohio spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis).   The 2 shorties in front of it are Florida scrub skullcaps (Scutellaria arenicola) that I purchased, on a whim, from Dara at 7 Pines Native Plant Nursery.

I love skullcaps, but I knew nothing about this particular species except what Dara told me.  Since I really didn't know what I was getting, my hopes were high, but my expectations were pretty low.  Frankly, I'd be happy if these 2 plants liked where I planted them enough to survive without looking too bedraggled.

Here's what those 3 plants look like right now.  I've been enjoying the Ohio spiderwort, which has been blooming every day for weeks and weeks.  That shade of blue just lifts my spirits.  I had literally forgotten about the scrub skullcap, so I was shocked to realize, yesterday morning, that some of the blue in that corner of the garden was actually coming from a bloom spike on the Florida scrub skullcaps.  How exciting!

Looking at this closer photo, the skullcap bloom spike is going diagonally from the lower right hand corner to about 2/3 of the way to the upper left hand corner.  The blue in the background at the top comes from the spiderwort blossoms.

I do need to get a closer photo of the blossoms for you..... 

Comparing my plants to those I see in pictures online, I think these 2 individuals may be getting a little too much water.  The plants seem taller than expected and rather floppy, which I didn't anticipate, and the bloom spike a little too elongated.  Greg's wanting to get our grass up to a reasonable standard, since we're living in a neighborhood, so we're using the sprinkler system that was here when we purchased our home.  I don't think these plants need or particularly want the extra water, but hopefully it won't hurt them too much either.  Certainly you don't get much better drainage than our highly sandy soil.


I'll be watching these guys a lot more carefully in the upcoming days.  What a great surprise on a hot and humid mid-June morning!

Rain Lily Rescue

About a week before the house down the street from us was due to be torn down, due to terminal decrepitude, I noticed several pink trumpets peeking out from under the base of a large popcorn tree seedling in the badly overgrown yard.  On the day that demolition began, and despite a neighbor assuring me that "they won't care", I finally called the company name on the sign out front and asked for permission to dig these plants.  I was pretty sure they were pink rain lilies.

The male voice on the other end of the phone authoritatively told me that I was welcome to have any plants that I wanted to dig, anywhere in the yard.  I gave him my name, to be sure that he knew who I was, and decided to come back that evening after the demolition had stopped for the day.

That evening Greg and I drove down and parked in front of the now-cordoned-off yard.  A middle-aged man and his 10 year old son were on the sidewalk, examining the now partially demolished house.  When Greg and I ducked under the tape and started to dig, they decided it was okay if they ducked under the tape, too, and they proceeded to walk all around the partially wrecked house, looking at it closely.

As I started digging, I noticed there were more rain lilies than I had estimated, but I saw no reason to leave any of them to be scraped away and hauled to the landfill.  While I dug and Greg held the popcorn tree sapling back for me, the man and his son started asking questions and continued to poke around.  I warned them that I had called to get permission to rescue the plants, but there was no change in the man's behavior.  It was dusk, so I couldn't afford to wait any longer and I kept digging.

It wasn't long before another car drove up and a man rather heatedly got out and came towards us, asking what we were doing.  I explained that I was rescuing the rain lilies, with permission and with my husband's help.  The other man just started asking questions about why the house was being demolished.

It turned out that the house had been purchased by a pair of brothers, one of whom had given me verbal permission over the phone and the other of whom was confronting us.  My only mistake was in not asking for the name of the man I was talking with on the phone that morning.

Before long, 2 other neighbors had joined us, including one who knew both me and the owner of the house.  We all just stood and talked for a while before I left the group and went over to finish my rescue operation before it got dark.  When I was done, I had 7 plastic grocery bags with healthy clumps of rain lilies in them.  I had also seen a few rattlesnake weed tubers fall out of the sandy soil as I dug, so I knew I was "rescuing" rattlesnake weed*, too.

Once I had the bags of rain lilies in the car and had put away my shovel, all without walking through the remains of the house or hurting myself, the owner visibly seemed to relax.  He told me that he'd been afraid someone was trying to salvage copper pipe from the house and that we'd get hurt in the wreckage.  When I asked if I could check out the back yard, too, to see if there were any plants worth salvaging, he readily gave his permission, with the caveat that I wait until demolition was complete.

Despite my good intentions, I haven't explored that back yard yet.  Frankly, it took quite a while just to get all of the pink rain lilies that I rescued safely tucked in.

Because of the rattlesnake weed issue, I decided that I needed to remove all of the "native soil" and plant just the bare bulbs, even though this isn't a good time of year to transplant rain lilies.  I put 4 groups of 7-10 bulbs of varying sizes around the yard - and I still had 6 plastic bags of rain lilies left.

At that point, I decided that I needed to approach this differently, so I set up a potting assembly area and started taking the bulbs out of the "contaminated" soil and planting them into nursery pots.  When I finally got to the last plastic bag, I opened it to find blooms trying desperately to reach the open air.

That clump of bulbs went directly into a big pot, rattlesnake weed be damned (for now).

For most of the time, as I pulled the rain lily bulbs out, I hand-sifted the soil, looking for small bulblets and rattlesnake weed tubers, which I carefully sorted out.  The rattlesnake weed tubers are in the upper left corner of the cookie sheet;  you can see how the plant gets its name.  The other piles are every other lump I came across, most of them small rain lily bulbs.  Sometimes it was hard to distinguish which was which, so I separated them all. then lumped like bulbets together and planted the questionable little bulbs in a separate pot, allowing me to monitor them more carefully. 

I lost count of all the rain lily bulbs I ended up with.

I now have the 4 clumps of rain lilies in the ground, plus 2 pots of bulbs that I simply filled with unsifted clumps that were sending up bloom spikes again, including the clump above.  That pair of pots probably has some rattlesnake weed in them, so I'm planning on emptying them during the winter and replanting just the rain lily bulbs.  I don't currently have rattlesnake weed in the yard, and I'd prefer to keep it that way if I can.

Besides those 6 groups, I ended up with one large clay dish and 14 one-gallon nursery pots filled with 5+ rain lily bulbs each, plus 2 pots chock full of bulbets and 1 pot of probable bulbets.

I also found several centipedes, a couple slugs, a piece of old brick, and half a dozen old "mummified" acorns while I was sifting.  The living animals were released into the garden.

Some of the rain lilies put on a flush of blooms while I was planting them.  Now there are quite a few new bloom spikes coming up again, a week later.

As the blooms have come and gone, I've been able to give my plants a more definitive identification:  Rosepink Zephyrlily, Zephyranthes grandiflora, according to the USDA Plant Database.  Most of the time, this species is simply called pink rain lilies.  I was correct in my original, tentative identification.  The USDA Plants Profile shows them as spottily native to the Southeast, although not listed as native to Okaloosa County, FL.  Some sources believe this species is more truly native to Mexico, Central America, and Colombia.

These little beauties are not hardy where the soil freezes, but I have seen them treated as a potted plant and either kept indoors year round or put outside in the summer and brought into a basement or semi-heated garage for the winter.

When all's said and done, I'm super happy with the results of my plant rescue - despite the few dicey moments when we were actually out digging.  My take home from that is, in the future, to be sure to get the name of anyone I receive permission from!

__________________
*Rattlesnake weed is also known as Florida betony.  Although it is a native plant, it is considered an extremely obnoxious lawn weed and is very difficult to eradicate.

Tall Grass Clumps By Lake - Weed or Not?

Over the course of the last year, Greg and I have been watching clumps of grass growing down by the lake on the lowest terrace.  He's been after me to get rid of them, arguing that they are weeds;  I've been resisting, feeling that they may be good plants with structural and wildlife value.  They do seem to form discrete clumps and the clumps are quite graceful and attractive.

I haven't been able to find a good grass site to identify them, however, and I don't have a good grass book for reference either.  The above photos were taken in early May.

This photo, of the ligule and sheath, was taken in early April.

For some reason, today has been the day that this identification problem has suddenly felt critical.  I e-mailed the local horticulture agent with the photos of the grass from April and May, but I haven't heard back from him.  So I started to write this blog post, asking for help from the blogging community.  Before I did that, however, I decided that I needed current  photos.

So I went down by the lake and took them.

Here's a different clump of the same species, showing the overall structure, ....

here are the ligules and sheaths,...

and here are the seed heads.

Upon looking at the pictures of the seed heads closely, my mind suddenly told me, "Paspalum."   It didn't tell me which Paspalum, though, so I went to the USDA Plant Profile Database and looked up the genus, checking the ranges given and photographs, if any.

I am sad to report that Greg was probably correct.

I am now pretty certain that this grass is Vasey Grass, Paspalum urvillei.  It is a native of South America and is considered invasive in Hawaii.  It is fairly widespread across the southern U.S. (not including Arizona and New Mexico) and is becoming a problem pasture weed in the Florida panhandle.

A weed is a plant that's out of place - and Vasey Grass is out of place in my yard.

So I've got some hot, sweaty work that needs to be done:  cutting off and bagging all the seedheads before the seeds drop, then rooting out the plants and freeing the soil for other, more desireable species.

On the plus side, though, I really like how the tall clump grass looks along the water's edge.  Now, what more desireable species can I plant there?

Smiling at Wasps

Just outside our kitchen window are the lower branches of a pignut hickory tree.  The leaves are typical for hickory in June - bright green, compound, and in pretty good condition, but nothing showy or unusual.  Often, when I look out the window, I see a wasp or two flying in and out of the leaves, seeming to inspect them top and bottom.

A few years ago I would have freaked out a bit.  Where was the wasp nest?  Would I get stung as I was changing out the hummingbird feeder water or emptying and refilling the small birdbath just below these branches?  What is that wasp DOING out there?!

Now I relax...and quietly thank each wasp I see.  Why this change in my attitude?

After living on this Earth for almost 60 years, I finally realized that wasps weren't my enemies, they were my friends.  The wasps I see inspecting the hickory leaves are looking for caterpillars to paralyze and take to their nest as food for their progeny.  Those very wasps are probably almost completely responsible for the fact that the hickory leaves still look good, even this early in the growing season.  To my knowledge, all wasp young are raised on meat, a.k.a. caterpillars and other insects/arthropods.  Some wasp species hunt cicadas, some wasp species hunt grasshoppers, some wasp species hunt spiders...and many wasp species hunt caterpillars.

Meanwhile, most adult wasps feed on nectar and/or pollen.  You can often see them feeding on flowers, as in my photo from Kansas, taken in October, 2014.

It's only in defense of their nest - their eggs and young and queen - that wasps generally get nasty-tempered, and many wasps are solitary nesters, so they don't get nasty-tempered even then.

Meanwhile, the female wasps patrol our yards and gardens all day long, hunting for the caterpillars or even grasshoppers munching on our plants.

Will I happily allow a paper wasp nest to be built right outside a commonly used doorway?  No.  However, I do allow mud daubers to build there, since they are solitary wasps and not aggressive.  Now, too, I allow paper wasp nests to be built in out-of-the-way places, although I do note carefully where they are, so I can steer clear of them.

It never ceases to amaze me how well "nature" works when we get out of its way.  It's never as scary as it seems before we take the time to realize what's actually going on.