Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day: March 2009

This is my first time participating in Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day. I've known about it a long time and follow what others have blooming, but I'm such a terrible gardener that I don't typically have much blooming. But, this month is different!

I planted a Japanese Magnolia two years ago. The student club had a big plant sale and it was a great deal. It was one of the first plants that I planted in our new landscape. It had one or two blooms last year, but this year it just took off!


I know this makes Tom really mad. He is a great gardener (well, he is the Florida Master Gardener Coordinator!) and he has six or eight of these trees. But, the squirrels eat his buds off every year! He never gets any flowers and this makes him very, very mad at the squirrels.




I just LOVE these flowers! I think they're beautiful and I'm always sad to see them stop blooming.

Second Week of TV Shooting

We spent our second week filming for our upcoming TV show. I couldn't be there all week, so I didn't get too many pictures. It's been crazy at work lately and my blogging is suffering for it.

There is a great rose trial garden at the Plant City Campus. I really liked this rose. Sydney Park Brown did a segment on low maintenance roses. I have a knock out in my yard, but I love these old Florida varieties.



Here's our American Gothic Gardeners - Walter Reeves, our show host, and Sydney Park Brown, our consumer horticulture specialist. I love this picture of them.

Sunflower Picture

I love sunflowers and this is a great picture taken by one of our resident UF/IFAS photographers, Tyler Jones. Great shot, Tyler!

Passion Flowers

I love passion flowers! They're native to Florida, butterflies love them, and they have amazing flowers. They're also called maypops. I have a white flowering one in my yard, but I really want one of these purple ones. This picture was taken at the Marion County Extension Office. It had two to three blooms open and about 15 almost ready to bloom. I bet it looks amazing this week.

Plant of the Month - Pentas

I've got pentas in my yard and love them. They're great butterfly attracters. This month we're featuring them as the Plant of the Month.

Here's what Gardening in a Minute writes about them.

"When other plants fade in Florida’s hot and humid summers, perennials like Pentas lanceolata truly shine. These attractive plants produce red, pink, or white flowers throughout the summer and are a great source of food for hummingbirds and butterflies.

Pentas is one of those plants like coleus and vinca that has become widely known by its Latin name instead of a different common name. The genus is so-named because there are five lobes at the end of each tubular flower."


I love the sweet little flowers on these. Don't you?

My New Front Garden

My sister, Erin, is the new commercial horticulture agent in Jacksonville. Luckily for me, she's pretty handy with landscape design. I've been letting my free plants sit for more than a week because I never know where to put plants so that they look nice. She was here on Saturday for a graduation party for the other sister, Alli, and was nice enough to place plants for me. I've now got a nice, filled in bed. I planted lots of zinnia and lantana, some geraniums, and a few duranta and elephant ears. I also had a few extra plants such as sweet potato vine, basil, vincas, and some other stuff. I also have two hibiscus and a mandevilla that I planted in pots. I wasn't sure where I wanted to put those.

Here's the front bed with mostly zinnias in it. The elephant ears also went in here. There are two varieties of elephant ears. One is a black magic, maybe? The plants aren't labeled great when we get them, so I usually have to have one of the horticulturists help me identify them. You can also see the amaryllis planted close to the porch. It's also on the other side of the porch. Most of those bulbs are free from Tom's neighbor. I love free plants.


This is the lantana bed. I had planted lantana last year (again freebies!) that had frozen back. They've come back nicely and we've planted the many other different colored lantanas around them. You can also see the Japanese magnolia that's leafed out nicely.


This is the side of the house garden. It looks like there are mostly geraniums planted here, but there's also duranta and plumbago. The small crape myrtle was from my mom's yard last year. And, we planted vinca underneath it. Notice that we didn't put anything too close to the fence. This is preventive Tebow planting so that he can't reach through and eat it.


I'm very happy with the way these have turned out. And, greatly appreciate having all the help from family and friends who have much more gardening experience than I. They're pretty patient with me and tell me the same things every year at the same time. Thanks guys!

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.