The same August day that the Garden Writers Association (GWA) visited Susan Beard’s garden in suburban Oak Grove, Illinois, in Chicago’s western suburbs, which I wrote about in a recent blog, we were also treated to a stop at the Hinsdale garden of Kellie O’Brien. We got our first peek through the boughs of a crabapple, part of the large mixed border surrounding her front lawn.
As befits Kellie’s design/contracting company, English Gardens, and the architecture of her home, the garden style here was formal, with clipped hedges containing all the ebullience of the borders, including many hydrangeas. And there were lots of conifers to give interest during Chicago’s long winters.
But Kellie is known for her masterful touch with tropical plants that enjoy Chicago’s warm, humid summers. Have a look at this container with colocasia, chartreuse sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas ‘Margarita’), coleus and other foliage plants…..
….. and another nearby containing a tree-form angel’s trumpet (Brugmansia).
We headed to the back garden to meet Kellie. As I walked past this windowbox featuring magenta-leaved Persian shield (Strobilanthes dyerianus), silvery licorice plant (Helichrysum petiolare), trailing purple heart (Tradescantia pallida ‘Purpurea’) and silver ponyfoot (Dichondra argentea ‘Silver Falls’), it was clear that she had a deft touch with subtle colour combinations.
We walked down the flagstone path beside her house…..
….and in the back found more containers stuffed with colourful caladiums, coleus and other tropical delights…..
…. and an enclosed bed containing big-leafed alocasia.
There was a lion’s head fountain nestled in climbing hydrangea (H. anomala ssp. petiolaris)…..
….. and a seating area set into lush plantings of ferns, tropicals and beautifully-displayed container plants……
…. like that popular houseplant mother-in-law’s tongue (Sansevieria trifasciata), displayed as a stunning centrepiece surrounded by yellow lantana and a charteuse sedge.
Teak furniture with red cushion accents surrounded a table with a wink to “lawn furniture” – a circular doily of actual lawn!
There were more containers arrayed around the terrace. I loved the yellow allamanda mixed with pink begonias in this one, also featuring canna and alocasia….
Today, more than 45% of men after the age of 40 suffer from erectile dysfunction, a repeated inability to gain https://unica-web.com/archive/2017/unica2017-palmares-2.html buy brand cialis and keep sufficient erection needed for satisfying sex. It is a medicine viagra wholesale price used to give sexual desire to men who suffers from erectile dysfunction. Tension is a major feature of patients with get cialis prostatitis. Synthetic drugs: wikipedia reference buy viagra online or Sildenafil, viagra, buy viagra online or Vardenafil: The only approved chemicals for ED, unica-web.com, work in the office or home and execute any kind of work. ….. and the bright orange of the guzmania in this one…..
…. and the red allamanda picking up the colour splash of the caladium in this one.
Kellie had set up a patio table with refreshments for us, including iced red hibiscus tea. And she’d arranged one of the prettiest floral tablescapes I’ve ever seen, with green hydrangea blossoms set atop hosta leaves.
Then she took a few moments to tell us about the garden and her history of getting into garden design. She mentioned that the garden was often used to host fundraising events for the school that she started in Tanzania, the O’Brien School for the Maasai. As we sipped our drinks, she related how it had come about.
(I have quoted most of the following from the history section on the school’s website. “
In 2006, Kellie and her daughter, Heather, traveled to Tanzania to go on safari, climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, and volunteer at a convent in Sanya Juu. While there, they asked the Sisters for any other projects they could help with. The Mother Superior at the time, Sister Dona, told them: “There is a Maasai man named Gabriel who keeps coming to us asking to help his village with a school.” When they visited the village, they were greeted by 150 members of the Maasai tribe. A few men stood before Kellie and offered their most prized possession, their land, to her if she vowed to build a school for their children. As Kellie looked around at the many children who were at home during school hours, she and her daughter knew what they must do. They discovered that their real purpose of their trip to Africa was to give the children of that village hope for the future. Ten days later, they returned to the village and designed the school on the back of an envelope. When they left Tanzania just two days later, concrete blocks and sand were already in place to begin construction. They are now at their student capacity of 420, ninety percent of whom are Maasai, and celebrate graduating classes each year.
Our thirst quenched, it was time to explore the back garden, via a beautiful cobble pathway through shade plantings…
…where an island bed (or maybe ‘peninsula bed’ is a better term) extended into the lawn….
…. and featured beautifully-grown hostas under the shade of big trees.
I adored this rattan chaise lounge, and could imagine bringing a book out here to nod off reading…..
…or maybe relaxing on this Luytens bench…..
But Kellie isn’t only about tropicals and manicured hedges in her garden. She had a lovely little potager at the very back, its paths mulched with straw dampened from the rain, and vegetables growing in abundance….
…. including cherry tomatoes tied to handsome stakes.
Then it was time to say goodbye. And this is a good time to say “Thank you” to all those people, like Kellie, who generously open their gardens to passionate fellow gardeners so we can look and learn and enjoy.
This didn’t start out to be a blog. This morning I was uploading grasses & sedges to my online stock library of plant images when I came to the genus Carex. It’s a very slow process, keywording and uploading, squeezed in between the rest of life. Last winter, I managed to get Cacti and Succulents and Ferns and Cycads uploaded; this year I’m hoping to complete Grasses and Bulbs.
As I uploaded photos of Carex buchanani, leatherleaf sedge or Buchanan’s sedge from New Zealand, I recalled fondly the year I grew it in the pots on my lower deck in Toronto. It was 2013 and the containers are the double-walled resin pots I’ve had for two decades. In British Columbia leatherleaf sedge would be perennial but in my Toronto garden—and especially in exposed pots – it’s an annual. As I looked at photos from that year, it occurred to me that ornamental grasses don’t always get their due as hardworking container plants. As a compulsive chronicler, I had photos from the week I planted it until the very end of the year (which featured a disastrous weather event in the city’s history). I thought you might enjoy browsing through six months in the life of Carex buchananii, the leatherleaf sedge. First of all, let’s raise a glass (grass?) to John Buchanan (1819-1898), Scots-born New Zealand botanist and draughtsman and author of the 3-volume folio The Indigenous Grasses of New Zealand for whom leatherleaf sedge is named.
June 1 – Now let’s look back at the spring of 2013. I planted the six pots at the end of May, and this is what they looked like on June 1st. Carex buchananii was in the centre with an assortment of fancy-leaf pelargoniums and orange Calibrachoa and dusky-hued sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) surrounding them.
June 12 – By now, my neighbour’s beauty bush (Kolkwitzia amabilis) was in full bloom and the deck pots were filling out a little.
June 21 – On the summer solstice, my deck garden down the stairs from the containers was frothy with Clematis recta ‘Purpurea’….
…… and the leatherleaf sedge was fountaining as the pelargoniums grew bigger.
July 4 – Now summer was here and the fancy-leaf pelargoniums sported flowers. My favourite is the red-splashed, chartreuse cultivar ‘Indian Dunes’.
July 22 – A few weeks later, my patio edging of hostas was in flower and the last few annoying, invasive tawny daylilies were still blooming.
August 7 – This would have been peak flowering for the containers, which now showed the lovely effect of the bronze grasses and the colour echoes of the splashes on the pelargoniums……
…… while the sweet potato vines trailed ebulliently over the pot edges. But as a gardener who goes away to a lake north of the city all summer long, this array of containers relied on my husband’s regular watering. Within a few years, he’d be working at the lake, then fully retired (which he did last December). The pots would, in time, need some rethinking.
October 8 – With the cooler temperatures of autumn, flowering had now slowed on the annual flowers but the grasses continued to look good.
October 21 – See that azure-blue in the background, below? My garden is filled with fall monkshood (Aconitum carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’) and it shines between Canadian Thanksgiving and Remembrance Day, one of the latest perennials to flower. And the Tiger Eye sumac (Rhus typhina ‘Bailtiger’) in the rear that was bright chartreuse all summer now turned bright apricot-orange.
Here’s a closer view of the pots with the sedge even richer in colour. I loved this combination of bold fall hues.
November 9 – By the beginning of November, there’d been a hard frost and the pelargoniums had died. But the grasses still looked good – because it’s hard to tell a dead carex from a live one, as the saying goes…..
November 16 – After cleaning out dead annuals, I added cut conifer boughs and Southern magnolia (M. grandiflora) for the holiday season and (hopefully) all winter. The leatherleaf sedge added some needed texture.
November 27 – Snow came early in 2013 and provided an apt illustration of why Canadians from the prairie provinces eastward smile when they hear the phrase “winter garden”.
Well, the holly looked good anyway.
December 22 – On the night of December 21, 2013, freezing rain began to fall on Toronto, lasting for hours and leaving behind ice-coated trees and shrubs, downed wires and a city without electrical power, in places for several days. Winter was so cold that year, there were shady areas in my garden where flagstones were still icy in late March! But my winter pots and the leatherleaf sedge looked quite beautiful, in a crystalline way.
Had the leatherleaf sedge not already died, the ice storm was the nail in the coffin. But I had enjoyed those textural sedges-with-edges for six full months.
EPILOGUE:
The deck pots have always been both fun and a challenge to plant up each spring, especially considering the summer watering issue. Below are a few of the other years. And they haven’t always held grasses.
2010 – I’ve always loved pelargoniums in bright, Mediterranean hues, and this year I combined them with the newly popular ‘Margarita’ sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) for eye-popping effect. The pond garden looked quite…. tame… that year. And I hadn’t yet planted the Tiger Eye sumac in the background.
2011- The next year, I switched up the sweet potato vine in the pots for gold oregano (Origanum vulgare ‘Aureum’) but it wasn’t nearly as vigorous and turned plain green by midsummer, as many chartreuse-leafed plants do.
2014 – The spring after the leatherleaf sedge saga above, I had just been to California and was wowed by the orange Anagallis hybrid ‘Wildcat Mandarin’ in the Santa Barbara area. I decided to go all out and plant it in the pots with ‘Red Rooster’ leatherleaf sedge (Carex buchananii) and burgundy and chartreuse foliage accents, but my California dreaming simply didn’t pan out for a summer’s worth of bloom (at least with an absentee gardener). You win some, you lose some…..
2015 – This was the year I decided to stop buying expensive annuals and try to perennialize the pots. Good plan. My mistake was doing it with expensive heucheras. All summer, they looked understatedly beautiful with their jewel-like leaves, especially perked up with a reprise of the sedge and apricot-orange Calibrachoas. But not one heuchera survived a Toronto winter. Fail.
2016 – I decided to get serious about keeping plants alive two years ago, and invested in the ultra-hardy native grass sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula). Since it grows alongside railroad tracks on the Canadian prairies, I knew that would be a good bet. Harder to gauge was the likelihood that the pink sedums I selected to accompany the grass would be happy year-round in a container. I seeded in some orange nasturtiums so as not to be too tasteful with the pinks…..
….. and by late summer, the deepening colours of the sedums echoed beautifully the plum foliage of the alternate-leafed dogwood (Cornus alternifolia) at the back of the garden. And I liked the zing-zing of the grass!
2017 – Success! Everything lived through winter and by July, the sideoats grama was filling out nicely. But was it filling out a little toooooo much? Could the sedums survive a prairie grass?
The sedums did their pink thing in September.
By October 21st, everything was still alive, but a little underwhelming in the looks department. Ah well, I hadn’t spent a penny on plants and the grasses looked absolutely fabulous as the autumn winds blew them around.
2018 – This year I added some seeds of Viscaria oculata ‘Blue Angel’ to bare spots in the containers in early spring and I think every seed germinated (I removed some and took them to the cottage on Lake Muskoka). I thought it would be fun to end this blog with a video I made of the deck containers on a cicada-buzzy, bird-chirpy August day.
I’ve never understood the antipathy to orange in the garden that so many people seem to have. For me, orange is fun to pair with other hues, whether in a warm blend of citrus & sunset colours, like my deck pot at the lake one summer, below, with its nasturtiums, African daisies, zinnias and pelargoniums ….
….. or in classic combinations like orange and blue (complementary contrasts on the colour wheel), or orange and purple, as illustrated in a few combinations below. (Click for larger photo.)
I came upon a few great examples on my day at the Chicago Botanic Garden last week, One lovely planting on Evening Island paired Mexican daisy (Tithonia rotundifolia ‘Fiesta del Sol’) with blue bog sage (Salvia uliginosa). I loved this duo!
These two are also wonderful pollinator plants, the tithonia attracting lots of butterflies, including monarchs….
….. and swallowtails, like the black swallowtail below.
And the bog sage is a fabulous lure for bees. While I stood there for a few minutes, I saw lots of honey bees and native bumble bees and carpenter bees, like the big one below.
Orange can even be a feature in wetlands or pond margins, as we see below on the shore of the Great Basin, with Canna ‘Intrigue’ and its ruby-throated hummingbird visitor.
Another CBG combo I liked was in the Circle Garden, with old-fashioned orange zinnias (Z. elegans) consorting with a lovely pale orange-yellow coleus splashed with red. I couldn’t see a label, but it might be ‘Copper Splash’.
A few years back, I did an in-depth blog post exploring orange flowers, foliage and accessories for the garden. If you didn’t catch it, you can find it here. Orange! What’s not to love?
It was the first touring day of our 3-week garden tour of New Zealand with the American Horticultural Society and our Kiwi-born guide (and Pennsylvania-based landscape architect) Richard Lyon of Garden Adventures, Ltd. We headed away from Auckland on the north island, stop #1 on the itinerary map below…
… leaving its beautiful skyline behind us.
Before long, we arrived at Totara Waters, Peter and Jocelyn Coyle’s specialist bromeliad nursery and subtropical garden in Auckland’s Whenuapai suburb. If you can imagine a garden as the love-child of Roberto Burle Marx’s tropical tapestries and the spiky succulents of the American southwest, this one might be it. On a lush hillside overlooking a sound within Waitematā Harbour, we were met with beds of bromeliads under palm trees.
Peter and Jocelyn related the history of their garden, begun in 1999.
There were collections of cycads around the house, some adorned with the Coyles’ vintage planters and chimney pots.
I loved photographing the cones of cycads, including this male cone of the sago palm cycad (C. revoluta).
And as a honey bee photographer, I was fascinated to see them avidly harvesting pollen from that cycad’s cone.
Near the house was Dasylirion acrotrichum or green sotol.
On the hillside overlooking the water was an impressive collection of succulents.
It’s always lovely to see a well-grown spiral aloe (A. polyphylla)….
….and a perfect agave…..
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What a stunning Aloe bainesii.
At the bottom of the two-acre garden, there was an unusual water feature: the rusted hulk of a decommissioned navy ship, the Hawera. The Hoyles added their own rusty art to echo the wreck.
A small nursery onsite attracts bromeliad-lovers…..
…. and also provides an outlet for Totara’s named introductions, like Neoreglia ‘Totara War Paint’, below.
Bromeliads, of course, featured large at Totara Waters, including a stunning Alcantarea imperialis in flower near the garden’s parrot cage…..
….and a beautiful Vriesea splendens.
There was a good collection of bonsai plants…..
….carnivorous plants….
…and what is said to be the largest staghorn fern (Platycerium bifurcatum) in all New Zealand.
In the garage driveway was a restored Chevy truck, appropriate for Peter Coyle, who made his career as a ‘panel beater’, which is Kiwi slang for a collision repair specialist.
It was a delight to be there; then we were in the bus and heading inland to another beautiful garden and our first communal New Zealand dinner.
My last blog of the year is a botanical taste of early winter in a warm climate, specifically the climate of southwest Florida. Come with me on a tour of the beautiful Marie Selby Botanical Gardens (MSBG) on Sarasota Bay, a garden I’ve been privileged to visit in December twice in the past few years. Ready? Let’s start on the Flower Walk outside the garden. That’s right, “outside the garden”. In the spirit of generosity and community-mindedness, there are beautiful plants and great design ideas everywhere on South Palm Avenue, including the parking lot exits – like this firespike (Odontonema sp.)….
….and a brilliant Aechmea representing Selby’s deep collection of bromeliads…..
….and on the fence ouside the garden are a spectacular garlic vine (Cydista aequinoctialis)……..
….which deserves its own closeup….
…. and luscious chalice vine (Solandra longiflora)…..
….and butterfly vine (Stigmaphyllon ciliatum) with a visiting hover fly.
I’m surprised on the flower walk to see so many honey bees nectaring on blossoms, including these ones on Bulbine frutescens, left, and nectar-robbing on Cape honeysuckle (Tecomaria capensis), right.
But later, when I return to my car, I spot the feral beehive up in a live oak tree. Though it shows signs of having been plugged in the past, the clever bees have clearly overcome that obstacle.
Marie Selby’s entrance is overhung by these native live oaks (Quercus virginiana) draped with epiphytic Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides) – which is not a moss, but a flowering plant, a bromeliad. This familiar relationship of tree and epiphytic bromeliad is also emblematic of the botanical garden’s mandate to conserve, collect and display epiphytic plants, not just from Florida, but throughout the tropics.
The courtyard outside the entrance, with its traveller’s palms and little fountains, offers a lovely spot to rest – and a true enticement to enter. For it’s on the wall near the entrance where a display of plants hints at the garden’s origins.
All the plants mounted on the wall, below are epiphytes or “air plants”, for which the garden has enjoyed worldwide renown for more than 40 years.
It isn’t long before visitors discover a little about Marie Selby (1885-1971), the Sarasota garden club member and widow of oilman Bill Selby (Selby Oil & Gas) who, through the family foundation, deeded her home and grounds as well as adjacent properties bounded by Sarasota Bay and Hudson Bayou to create a botanical garden “for the enjoyment of the general public.” The dilemma for those charged with determining a theme for the garden back in the early 1970s was what kind of garden it should be. Fortunately, they were advised to specialize in a class of plants that no other public garden had focused on: epiphytes from the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Also known as “air plants” these species — mostly orchids, bromeliads and ferns — grow on a host, usually a tree, but occasionally a wall or fence or rooftop which affords them support and more sunlight than would be available to them at ground level in the rainforest.
The part of the garden that hosts the lion’s share of epiphytes is just a stone’s throw from the entrance: the Tropical Conservatory. Here, visitors are treated to rarities collected by MSBG’s botanists since the garden’s inception. Let’s go past the serene Buddha…..
and take a stroll inside.
There is so much to see here, all to the soundtrack of jungle birds and dripping water. Below is the pendulous orchid Coelogyne rochussennii from Singapore and other parts of southeast Asia.
Orchids and bromeliads are put on display as they come into bloom, then moved into the garden’s greenhouses to rest. Below is Miltassia Shelob ‘Tolkien’.
There are rare carnivorous plants, like Nepenthes truncata, below….
…and more ordinary plants, like Cryptanthus ‘Pink Star’, below.
I loved this “São Paulo air plant”, Tillandsia araujei, named for the Arauje River in Brazil.
Perhaps the best way to appreciate the jewels of the conservatory is by taking a virtual tour via my little musical video, below.
Ready to head outside? Let’s go through the little bonsai exhibit.
MSBG isn’t just about conserving and displaying epiphytes; there are several other groups of plants represented in strong collections here, such as cycads from all over the world. Apart from Florida’s common, native coontie (Zamia floridana), there are rare cycads like this endangered Microcycas calocoma from a small area in west Cuba…
…..and a young Lepidozamia peroffskyana from eastern Australia. In time, this cycad will reach a height of 12 feet (4 metres) or more.
If you have questions about plants in the garden, there are strategically-placed, knowledgeable volunteers to help answer them.
The Fern Garden is a cool, shady oasis on a warm December day.
It contains majestic ferns, like Cyathea cooperi from New Zealand, above, and ferns that don’t really look like ferns, such as Doryopteris ludens from peninsular Malaysia.
In the shadows of the fernery is bridal veil (Clerodendrum wallichii) from India.
Moving clockwise through the garden, we come to the Bamboo Pavilion with its impressive, towering giant bamboo (Dendrocalamus giganteus), at right below – planted by Marie Selby herself.
Many other bamboos grow here, like the still uncommon Chinese Bambusa emeiensis ‘Flavidorivens”.
In December, the Koi Pond with its waterfall is decorated for the holidays.Overhanging the pool are trees draped with epiphytes.
If you want to grab a snack before touring the rest of the garden, it’s a good time to visit the nearby Selby House Cafe. I love the decor, which features photos of the Selby Collection and antique botanical prints of rare orchids.
The Ann Goldstein Children’s Rainforest Garden aims to educate as it entertains young visitors.
The Children’s Garden forms part of the Banyan Grove. Here kids are literally up in the treetops learning about the rainforest….
….playing on wonderful structures….
….and being occupied with fun activities related to the environment.
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The Cactus and Succulent Garden is not terribly big….
….but it features a few interesting Florida species, like Consolea corallicola.
As you walk south on the pathway through the garden towards Sarasota Bay, you can see the Hudson Bayou off to your left.
When I was at MSBG three years ago, I photographed a large, native gumbo-limbo tree (Bursera simaruba).
Sadly, for the tree, but luckily, for Marie Selby, it was the only casualty of Hurricane Irma this September.
The Steinwachs Famiy Mangrove Walkway brings visitors close to what makes Marie Selby Botanical Gardens so special: its location overlooking Sarasota Bay. That bridge is the John Ringling Causeway, named for Sarasota resident and Ringling Bros. & Barnum & Bailey Circus founder John Ringling (John and his wife Mable were as wealthy as their contemporaries, the Selbys) and it connects Sarasotans to the barrier islands St. Armand’s Key (with its high end shops) and Lido Key.
From the boardwalk, visitors walk through the natural mangrove swamps that form a vital ecosystem at Selby and along coastal areas in Florida. This is red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle), with its distinctive prop roots; it is one of three species native to the area. Sadly, in many parts of Florida, mangrove swamps have been removed to make way for resorts.
Walking under the Florida strangler fig (Ficus aurea) near the mangroves, we can look up and see spectacular, epiphytic birds nest ferns (Platycerium bifurcatum).
The Palm Garden (Arecaceae) features another of Marie Selby BG’s deep collections….
…with palms from many parts of the world, but especially Florida palms like Acoelorrhaphe wrightii, which is native to the tip of Florida and the Everglades.
For the most part, the garden’s collections are well labelled, and the warmth of the labels often attracts brown anoles (Anolis sagrei); this one lost its tail in a fight. Cherry palm is in the MSBG’s Coastal Palm collection.
As you continue along the path, you find many native plant in the next part of the garden, appropriately called Native Florida, including the lignum-vitae (Guaiacum sanctum) tree. Though I photographed the colourful fruit, its wood (lignum-vitae means wood of life) is considered the most dense of any species, and its hardness made it ideal historically for mortars-and-pestles and clock bearings.
Heading northwest, we come to the native shore plants along Sarasota Bay. Here we find shell mound or erect pricklypear (Opuntia stricta), which gets its name from its propensity to grow atop shell-laden dunes of coastal areas in the southeast U.S.
Planting saltmarsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) was a vital part of the 1997 shoreline restoration that occurred after MSBG acquired the Payne mansion, with its turfgrass lawn and exotic palm trees. The idea is that the cordgrass gradually traps debris and silt, forming hummocks that become land that supports the spread of the cordgrass and shore outwards.
The Tidal Lagoon at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens is where the salty Atlantic ocean interacts with the shore.
Amongst the natives here is gulf muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris).
The brackish water of the lagoon has yielded a surprising colony of dotleaf waterlily (Nymphaea ampla), whose native territory seems to have migrated from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
Here is an individual blossom. If I magnify this, I can just see the black spots on the sepals that gives this species its common name.
Nearby is a representative sample of “Florida subtropical hardwood hammock”. For ecologically-minded visitors, this section and the adjacent lagoon will be the most interesting part of MSBG, for they represent the natural ecosystem of wild Florida, at a time when it was still untouched by rampaging land-clearing, agriculture and urban development of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Circling back towards the entrance, we come to the Christy Payne Mansion, featuring the Jean & Alfred Goldstein Exhibition Series. Though the guide tells me I’ve just missed a wonderful autumn orchid show, I’m delighted to see the display in the little gallery…..
……for it contains a few vials from MCBG’s large spirit collection, the second largest in the world after Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in London. Here are orchids looking eerily beautiful in a window.
And as I’ve just finished reading Andrea Wulf’s fabulous biography The Invention of Nature – Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, I’m excited to see on the gallery wall an antique print of his Naturgemälde, the painting he made of volcanic Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, which he climbed in 1802 and whose vegetation he mapped according to elevation. He was the first to understand the topographic and geographic nature of plant communities, and his books were the basis of our understanding of ecology.
Bromeliads, of course, are a huge focus at MSBG….
…..and this ‘plant fountain’ filled with them is enchanting.
The big leaves of this neoregelia are a favourite haunt for the anoles….
….as are the bright-coloured flowers. This anole seems camouflaged in the aechmea.
This is Portea alatisepala ‘Wally Berg’, named for the Sarasota collector who was renowned for passion for collecting bromeliads.
This is Billbergia amoena.
We’ll take a fast run through the flower-filled Butterfly Garden…..
….. where a monarch rests on native dayflower (Commelina erecta).
And, finally, the Tropical Fruit Garden gives Sarasotans creative ideas about which fruit trees and vines they can grow outdoors. Here are just a few of the fruits & plant parts I photographed.
#1 is banana; #2 is kumquat; #3 is starfruit; #4 is coffee; #5 is loquat; #6 is sugar cane; and #7 is ‘Purple Possum’ passion fruit.
My last stop on the way back to the parking lot is to knock on the door of the botanist’s office to say hello to my Facebook friend, MSBG botanist and ecologist Shawn McCourt. Originally from Northern Ireland, he is fortunate to be working at the garden as it launches a 10-year, $67-million upgrade that will move plants out of the flood zone, reorganize the 15-acre garden for better flow, transform the sprawling parking lot into green technology buildings and a 5-story parking garage featuring a living wall.
It is an exciting prospect for this wonderful tropical garden, and I hope to return some winter soon to see how things are proceeding! In the meantime, may your Christmas be a merry one, and your new year filled with all things green!
