Garden Club of Cape Coral | Building a ‘Florida Friendly’ garden, part 1
By MERYL O’ROURKE
news@breezenewspapers.com
When I moved to Florida 29 years ago, I was not prepared for how different the growing of ANYTHING was here! I came from Vermont, a place of rich soil, seasons of riotous color, with a winter of giddy anticipation and planning of what would come next. Spring meant crocuses would gently push their way through the last of the snow, Fall would mean bedding down all my beautiful plants for that cold that was coming.
Florida brought a whole new thought process to the term “gardening” for me. After many years, I am now in a house where I have made the decision to plant what is called a “Florida Friendly Landscape.”
If you’re a follower of this column, you’ve seen a previous article written about adding native plants into your landscape. I’ll be taking you on my journey, start to finish, of what l’m removing, enriching, planning and adding.
The landscape around my house came with a few plants, most planted when the house was built in 1970. Some small palm trees, scraggly and uncared for. Those were the first to be removed. As they were no more than 6 inches in diameter, I was able to cut them myself and had my lawn service grind the stumps.
I have a beautiful royal palm in the back of the house, which matches the ones in the
front, so the decision was made to keep that. I live on McGregor Boulevard, and one of the highlights of my day is going out around sunset to the end of my driveway to look down the street at the magnificent royal palms that line the road. Glorious!
Also in the backyard were a pink bougainvillea and a plumbago that were allowed to grow together. From pictures I was able to find from a real estate listing a few years back, these were originally grown as an arch and simply were left uncared for. By the time I bought the house, they were a 20-foot mass, 9 feet high! My daughter and I thought we could just prune them down to manageable sizes. Nope, once we started working, we discovered a huge amount of damage within the inner stems. Abandoned bird nests, broken stems, simply a lack of care over the years.
My gardener’s heart was broken as we decided both plants had to completely come out. It took us 5 days to bring them down to the ground level. The lawn service had to remove those stumps.
The last thing removed wasn’t even something | wanted to remove! There was a magnificent Norfolk pine in the front yard. I know, not a native plant, however, I had decided to make an exception as it was beautiful and housed many bird nests. FPL was in the neighborhood trimming trees, cutting the top and the entire front of our tree! They made such a mess of the tree; I insisted they come and remove the entire tree!
I look forward to continuing this gardening journey with you!
Meryl O’Rourke is a UF/IFAS Master Gardener who volunteers at the Berne Davis Botanical Garden and the Goodwill Pathways To Opportunity Program.
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