Free Plants

One of the benefits of working in the environmental horticulture department is that we sometimes get free plants. These are usually leftovers from plant trials or research studies. I don't care where they came from - I get free plants!

Here's what I was able to get this time. I chose a lot of butterfly gardening plants because my 4-H club is getting ready to install a butterfly garden at the local library. I was going to ask for donations anyways, so this works pretty well.

I did get quite a bit of lantana. We won't be putting this in at the library because of the negative views of it. It actually was a plant that I had a really hard time putting in my landscape the first time. I grew up on an orange grove and, in orange groves, native lantana is very invasive and weedy. I spent much of my childhood spraying or pulling up lantana. Now, I love it (when it stays where it's supposed to) and appreciate it as a butterfly plant. We actually have several faculty members working on breeding a sterile version which is very exciting!


I love geraniums. They're so pretty and are great bloomers.


Zinnias for the butterfly garden. I didn't realize there were so many different cultivars and shapes that they came in!


This is the coleus everyone was jealous I got this year. Not sure which cultivar it is, but it's gorgeous! It's burgundy on the top of the leaves and lime green on the bottom. I've been told that it roots really easily from cuttings, so I'm going to to give it a try. Everyone's requesting a cutting once I get them going.


This is the sweet potato vine I was going to put in the container with it. Erin helped me out with picking it out. She's created a lot of awesome containers and has quite an artistic eye for them. I would never have chosen this to go with it, but I think it looks great.

Bees

Yesterday morning, one of our great faculty here at UF, Jamie Ellis, was featured on Good Morning America. Dr. Ellis is our bee expert and has recently been putting together a bee college for those interested in having home apiaries. He's also an expert on colony collapse disorder and has been educating on Africanized bees for sometime.

I've always known bees are important ecologically. I grew up on an orange grove and we often had apiarists with hives in our groves. But, until recently, I didn't realize the impact NOT having pollinators could have. I was hand pollinating my squash plants for awhile because of the lack of pollinators around. Imagine having to do this in a 1,000 acre squash field. Wow, we may not have any squash or any other vegetables for that matter. And, I love squash.

UF Genetics has also featured Dr. Ellis with Honey Bees lesson plans and videos. I like these videos because they're short and easy to understand and really bring about the importance of honey bees.

Video: I Heart Honeybees



Video: Show Me the Honey



Video: Where are the Bees?



Video: Bee Love



Video: Honey, I'm Home



Video: African Honey Bees, Public Enemy #1

Flower Power

Dr. Dave Clark is one of our horticulture breeders at UF. Not only is he really funny, but he's amazing at his job. He and a grad student have developed several varieties of very popular coleus (but I'll save that for another post). Most of the time he does his breeding through biotechnology methods. In this video, Dr. Clark talks about the interesting aspects of how people relate to flower scents.



In this video, Dr. Clark talks about the science behind the scent, specifically with petunias. If you like these, check out more info at UF Genetics. You can also find lesson plans and other info related to the Science of Scent.