Tulips in Tampa — and Celery and Asparagus, Too
It’s not often you get a blow-away moment in a garden. (Truth be told — it is for me. Which is why I so love writing about gardens. But before I got to visit all your gardens, I didn’t get blown away too often.)
When I saw Janice Straske’s tulip beds in February, I got goose bumps. Seriously. The drifts of colorful buds that absolutely don’t belong here were jaw-dropping beautiful. I wrote about it in the Tampa Bay Times, and there are more great photos there (most, like the one above, shot by fabulous photographer Caroline Hill).
Janice learned how to get tulip bulbs to bloom from her mother, Celia Ferman, a Tampa native and longtime member of the Rose Circle Garden Club (she, too, grows drifts of Tampa tulips in spring.) If you want to learn how to grow them, click the Times story.
I revisited Janice’s garden during the Earthly Paradise Garden Tour earlier this month. It’s the Rose Circle Garden Club’s annual fundraiser, and I’ve gone the past three years because I love it.
Here’s what Janice’s back fence looked like in February.
And just a couple months later, here’s that same back fence.
Janice has a variety of tomatoes growing. My friend Janna (in the photo) and I found plum tomatoes, cherries, and grapes, among others. Janice has three kids at home still — one will be heading off to college in the fall — and a husband, but I’m thinking she’ll be buried in an avalanche of tomatoes before long.
Earthly Garden Tour visitors also oohed and aaahed over the veggies we don’t often see growing in Tampa gardens. I can’t count the number of people who’d never seen celery outside the grocery store. (Me included — I was sniffing the leaves, thinking they were cilantro on steroids.)
And asparagus! Janice had whacked back her asparagus when I visited in February. Now, she’s got hors oeuvres — albeit for one.
Though she lives in the heart of the city — the Golfview neighborhood — Janice has chickens. The eggs are great and the poop is even more valuable (see plants above!) One just needs to make it work in the ‘hood you’re in. Here’s Janice’s coop.
Oops, no! That’s her house. Here’s her coop — you’ll forgive the error, I hope. Geez, it looks so much like the house!
I don’t think I’m ready for challenges like tulips and asparagus, but gardeners like Janice make me believe anything is possible.
The Bright Lights of Shade!
Readers told me they wanted MORE PICTURES when I wrote about Peter and Betty Peck’s Walmart-inspired garden in the Tampa Bay Times last month. Peter manages Walmart’s No.1 Florida store in Bloomingdale, Fla.; Betty works for a company that supplies Walmart with books and music. Can you say merchandising? These two have the market cornered when it comes to arranging for visual impact.
The green-cream-red plant in the foreground is Stromanthe sanguinea‘Triostar’, a super plant for adding color to shady situations. The lower growing flowers are impatiens and, on the two trellises, bougainvillea. If you can find at least a half-day of sun in your shady garden, bougainvilleas will reward you with lots of color. (They’re a Peck favorite.)
goose statue next to bench
“Goose,” left, is among the many old statues Peter and Betty inherited from Betty’s parents’ and grandparents’ decades-old gardens in Plant City.
Peter bought the pavers, above right, from a local stone-supply store and dug up the 120-by-4 feet of paths himself. He paid for the hands-and-knees work — strong work ethic has its limits! … I yearn for the day I can add paths like these.
Peter admits Dumpster-diving (when pressed) for this beautiful old wooden Adirondack chair that someone left in a bin outside his Walmart. Pots of impatiens and other plants create a beautiful vignette beneath a shade tree.
The Pecks love cordylines. In the foreground, Black Magic, and behind that, good old red ti.
Peter and Betty Peck not only have loads of color in a garden shaded by oaks, they have colorful personality. That’s retailer-meets-gardener.
Chickens & sun hats & ice plants — Oh my! It’s GreenFest!
I could want chickens. Heck, I could want everything. Which is my one complaint about GreenFest, the annual spring plant festival that reminds us Floridians why we put up with hurricanes, droughts, deep freezes (didn’t sign up for those!) and Eastern lubber grasshoppers.
The chickens at Holloway Feed Stores’ booth mesmerized my friend Zane, 6, his little sister, Annabelle — and lots of other kids and kids-at-heart, who got to cuddle little chicks, too. Proprietor Joey Holloway is ingeniously capitalizing on the urban chicken craze by building beautiful coops. They’re not just for your Grandma’s double-wide in Webster anymore!
GreenFest, which continues tomorrow (March 25) at the University of Tampa’s Plant Park, 401 W. Kennedy Blvd., Tampa, is celebrating its 15th year. It’s always Tampa’s first big spring plant festival, and the combination of 80-plus vendors, a beautiful setting (Plant Park), and a hard-working team of volunteers bent on making everyone happy makes it a hit year after year.
One plant I saw in lots of wagons was Spanish lavender, Lavandula stoeches, sold at Mitch Armstrong Nursery’s booth.
Annie Sprague, right, says Spanish lavender is fairly new to her and Mitch. She says this non-edible variety is supposed to better tolerate our summer heat and humidity. In the photo above. she’s fondling the foliage to awaken a sweet scent tinged with a piney undertone. Beautiful! The blooms, left, last through spring, but those soft green leaves keep the fragrance going.
“Lavender’s good for the soul,” Annie says. I have to agree — I forgot everything when she started massaging the foliage, which is a pleasantly soft feel.
Annie has her Spanish lavender at home doing well in morning sun (no afternoon sun) and complete shade.
Another item that was getting a lot of buzz, and buyers, was the habanero honey, below left, at Briarwood Farm’s booth. Apparently, it’s really good on chicken — the dead kind. Below right, purple ice plant — a little something I picked up for my sunny spots. I have another “ice plant” that looks completely different. This one is Delosperma cooperi.
I didn’t plan to buy a sun hat — I’m a $5 kind of garden-hat girl. But I’ve gotten lots of unflattering comments about my current hat (below left), and wow, the palm frond hats at It’s Our Nature were beautiful! My new hat is 6 times $5 but, what the heck. It’s also supposed to protect me from ultraviolet rays, which should make my dermatologist happy.
Someone who wasn’t hat shopping — Patsy Woodruff, president of Friends of Plant Park. She’s been wearing her “blooming’ idiot hat” since the first GreenFest 15 years ago. She’s so much braver than me!
Early spring brings a small (small!) bevy of blooms
I almost don’t know what to do this spring! My garden didn’t get Terminatored by freezes, so I don’t have to cut the whole thing back. Instead, I have freeze-nipped plants like this Clerodendrum shooting star. What to do? It still showed signs of life!
Pretty sad looking, right? But I’ve been growing this thing for at least 4 years, and cutting it back after freezes every winter. Since it blooms in spring, that means I’ve never seen the first flower. On the upside, every year when it comes back from the roots, it grows even taller and wider. The foliage is unusual and pretty — deep green on top, deep purple on the bottom. I can’t be give-up on this trooper.
I covered shooting star with a duvet for our first freeze. Then we warmed up and, even though it lost a lot of leaves, it had buds in February. I was thrilled! Another mild freeze and I had freeze-dried buds. But one … ONE … sprouted anew and I now have my first shooting star bloom.
Another first this year is lavender firespike. It’s supposed to be “easy” plant, at least that’s what Meems of Hoe and Shovel fame told me when she passed it along a few years ago. She lives in Lutz, just a few miles north and east of my home in the northwest Tampa area. You wouldn’t think a few miles difference would mean a lot, but in Tampa’s Zone 9abcdef, there are no givens!
Meems said she has to practically mow down her lavender firespikes, they proliferate so readily. I had to transplant mine three times before I found a spot where it would grow more than a foot tall. (Which just happened to be next to the hose and a Louis Philippe antique rose that gets regular doses of high-fat fertilizer.)
Meems’ lavender firespikes start blooming in December. Mine had a teeny tiny bud in December. It has taken a long time, but I’ve finally achieved flower.
The tweedia below I started from seeds mailed to me by Joan in Riverview a couple years ago. (She wanted Vietnamese hollyhock seeds. We traded. I’d never heard of tweedia!)
This member of the milkweed family has a strange growth habit. Some websites say it’s a vine; others call it a shrub. It has long thin limbs that sprawl out horizontally. Seedlings grow slowly, but once they get several inches tall, they take off. The sky-blue flowers bloom from spring to fall.
This beauty is the one and only plant that started from Joan’s seeds, so I’ve babied it in a container. I’ll be setting it free in the flowerbed, where I’ve spotted a couple of little volunteers. There’s a blue butterfly clerodendrum near the volunteers so I’m having visions of blue.
The Vietnamese hollyhocks Joan coveted are also known as fig-leaf hollyhocks. These are not your Yankee Grandma’s variety; those don’t grow here. These beauties do really well, though, especially if you have good soil. (I don’t, so mine live in pots.) You can start them from seed but be patient, they take months (many) to become flowering plants Cut back the dead stalks and you can coax this plant into growing for two or three seasons.
And finally, one of my favorite new annuals this year, the Phantom petunia. I got these in January and they’ve been beautiful ever since — despite our sometimes super warm days. I know they won’t last forever, but I enjoy looking at them, whether it’s from the kitchen window or while I’m puttering around the garden.
Normally, these have a yellow star pattern within the bloom. Some of the flowers get that yellow, some don’t. I don’t care — I love ‘em.
Last but certainly not least, I can’t say enough about the walking irises, which are blooming in sun-baked medians, along roadsides and in him gardens all over Tampa. These are stalwart plants with lots of different looks. I have the yellow freckled variety, the giant apostles Regina purples, and these “African iris” purple and white types, not to be confused with the non-walking African irises, which have a different flower.
All of mine were ripped out of gardens and handed over by friends in garbage bags, which usually is an iffy proposition for blooming success. They’ve proven incredibly tough. The last batch was blooming in a bucket of water that sat on the patio for a week!
I’m loving the pre-spring irises. Keep your daffodils and tulips, Yankees! We’ve got flowers, too!
At Orchid Society’s show, it’s not real complicated — just real pretty
I’m still in the pre-beginner phase of my orchid education, but at the Tampa Bay Orchid Society’s annual show on Sunday, I learned you don’t have to know a whole lot to fall in love.
If 6-year-old Romina McKernan is brave enough to take on a Phalaenopsis well, darn it, so am I!
Romina was among the many flower fans who turned out last weekend for the orchid society’s big annual three-day show and sale at the Egypt Shrine Center in Tampa. For the record, this beautiful young gardener readily admits she hasn’t yet mastered everything — but she’s willing to try, try again. (A good lesson for the rest of us.)
“My Grandma bought me some plants, but they died,” she told me. “I forgot to water them.”
The show was judged by official American Orchid Society officials who have very strict criteria. Basically, if you get one of their certificates, you can put your plant out to stud. Individuals, vendors and orchid clubs also competed for ribbons from the orchid society. The Tampa Orchid Club kicked butt. Its display of members’ orchids had as many colorful ribbons as blooms. AND it took the American Orchid Society’s Award for Most Outstanding Exhibit.
Disappointed (I’m betting) was Paul Phelps of Phelps Farm Orchids in Odessa. He has snagged the coveted Most Outstanding trophy the past four consecutive years, and really busted a root this year with a display featuring Mr. and Mrs. Terra Cotta Pot. (Can you spot the Mister?) I’d give this a People’s Choice Award, Paul! Too bad that wasn’t an option.
Eileen Hector, the society’s director of communications (as I’ve dubbed her because she communicates a lot with me!) stayed really busy helping check in shoppers and signing them up for lots of free raffles.
But she was kind enough to take a break and give me a personal walking tour of the show, during which she very patiently allowed me to test my fledgling orchid knowledge. (“That’s a VANDA!”) We ran into her mother-in-law, Urpiana Hector, (below) who entered her pink Phalaenopsis Schilleriana (behind her to the right) in the individuals competition. (For the record, you don’t have to be a club member or even pay a dime to enter your orchid in this show. And imagine the bragging rights if you won anything!)
We also ran into dentist Howell Morrison, president of the orchid society and husband of Donna Morrison, orchid painter extraordinaire. (He is SO proud of her, and rightfully so — her watercolors are gorgeous. It’s always nice to hear a hub extoll the wonders of his wonderful wife!) He was manning a booth featuring her paintings for sale. He’d also done some shopping; all those plants are to-go.
Among my favorite orchid varieties are the lady’s slippers, which have way too many Latin names and families for me to even try to get technical. When I was a little girl growing up in Vermont, finding a lady’s slipper in the woods was an exciting treat. Ours were delicate lavender blooms with big, fat lips, and we were taught never to pick them (which made me soooo want to!) Even then, they were threatened species. Eileen showed me the difference between lady’s slippers from different parts of the world. (She also kindly advised me to stay far, far away from the cash register — apparently they’re hard to grow. And she knows me!)
If you’re into orchids, or think you could be with some friendly guidance, this is a great club to hook up with. They meet at 6:30 p.m. the third Thursday of every month at the Tampa Garden Club, 2629 Bayshore Blvd., Tampa. Look for Eileen. She’ll make you feel welcome and not like an orchid dummy — even if you are.
Whoa! Gardeners scored at Tampa’s Super Bowl plant swap
They came by bicycle.
That’s Ann Thomas with the blue bike and Doreen Jesseph riding caboose. (Note the handlebar baskets full of goodies!) They pedaled over to Wes and Faye Miller’s house ready for trading at the Diggin’ Florida Dirt 2012 Plant Swap, which the Millers (so kindly!) and I co-hosted on Super Bowl Sunday.
I’ve organized a few swaps at this time of year, but NEVER one like this! Gardeners — about 150 — from all over the Tampa Bay area came to give plants, get plants, and (many) just to ask a lot of questions. Which is what a swap is all about. Yeah, I was surprised to see bicycles, but there were so many more surprises in store!
Along with car after SUV after pickup truck pulling up and unloading, we had folks like Hillsborough County Master Gardener Wonderful Virginia Overstreet (I’m a fan!) trundle up with her little red wagon.
Virginia was crucial for identifying mystery cuttings. I greeted people at the check-in, and if they — always apologetically — said, “I don’t know what this is but it’s a terrific plant,” I said, “Go out back and scream, ‘VIRGINIA OVERSTREET!’ ” She put lots of names to leafy stems.
And then there was Phil Compton, field organizer for Sierra Club Florida, and his wife, Liz Taylor, who paddled up in their canoe.
Swapping — which really isn’t “swapping,” people just bring stuff and take home stuff — got super hectic. As soon as new arrivals brought their cuttings and seeds, they got snapped up.
Above left, swappers pore over the offerings. Above right, Nanette O’Hara (in pink), an environmental reporter years ago and now safeguarding our estuary, and Nigel Barrable get intense about their cuttings. (Love it!) Behind them in the red shirt is Brittany Aukett, http://
People who had no cuttings or seeds to bring (which was totally cool — gardeners just love to share!) came loaded with goodies.
I was going crazy trying to get names but I just couldn’t get ‘em all! I loved this lady, above left, who expertly balanced her very delicious cupcakes while filling out her name tag.
Faye and Wes’s amazing backyard includes an outdoor kitchen that became a landing spot for gardeners to sit, chat, and suck up cupcakes (and fresh-squeezed lemonade, courtesy of Faye.) I spy Janice Vogt on the left. (I got one of her Chinese lantern cuttings. Score!!)
Everyone left just as they came, Ann (right) pedaled off with a
bike loaded down with cuttings.
I got a cool bounty of bromeliads that do well in sun and a well-established Vick’s plant (thank you, Sharon) , among other goodies.
I really, really enjoyed co-hosting with Wes and Faye, who did all the work. Thanks, you guys! Everyone enjoyed the extra bonus of roaming the Millers’ beautiful garden — which will be next Friday’s Times column.
Bye-bye 2012 swap!
Talkin’ Back