Gardening in Central Florida

(Spicy Jatropha, Jatropha integerrima ). August is upon us: Intense sun, daily highs around 92°, frequent deluges and night-time temperat...

One of the recommended roses from the Central Florida Rose Society, this 'Cecil Brunner' took a long time to come to bloom, but even...

Florida, with over 4,100 species of native or naturalized ferns and seed plants, is the third most floristically diverse state in the United...

O ne of the innumerable reasons I complain about living in Central Florida is that I've always wante d a large fruit orchard, and growin...

I'm out of town, away from my garden. In place of visits to my garden, I've been surfing the 'net and finding lots of useful lin...

The Cherokee Rose is a particularly thorny rose with a liana (scrambling, upright) growth pattern. Even its heps, which turn russet in the f...

Below: Plums on a Chickasaw Plum ( Prunus angustifolia )

( Above: Buds on a tuberose) The rainy season started in earnest while I was away on a research trip from mid-June to the Fourth of July. I...

The Southern Bulb Company Storefront : "...RARE AND HEIRLOOM BULBS... In many cases, our bulbs have survived naturally (unmaintained) f...

I'm reading Robbing the Hive right now, so this article in the NYT piqued my interests. I love bees: Every morning, I spend a few momen...

Not long ago, I condensed and reproduced a list of reliable and easy to care for roses for Central Florida . Here's another list of favo...

I love figs! Our old neighbor has a truly massive brown fig tree planted in her swale. It never gets irrigated, and receives full-day direct...

The Orlando Sentinel published a list of favorite roses from the Central Florida Rose Society. The criteria included: Continual bloom (good ...

W e have several species of tree frogs living around our house. This is one of two who live behind a wall fountain on the patio. They usua...

My dahlias continue to thrive... This is a lateral which I should have disbudded, but given that this is new territory for me, I opted for m...

A brown anole ( Anolis sagrei ) inflating its dewlap early one May morning. The plant in the background is an African Blue Basil , a 2006 FN...

Mediterranean Seas ( Delphinium tatsienense ) from Thompson & Morgan. I started these a bit late, in February or March, but they see...

A family of milkweed beetle ( Tetraopes tetraophtalmus ) enjoying the butterfly flora at Leu Garden. 

More true perennials for Florida: Up North, people think of mums as plants for fall. Here, though, Mums have two seasons: I buy them in earl...

Because we can't grow (perennially, in any case) tulips, hyacinths and daffodils, there's a strange idea common to Central Florida ...