Also on the east side of my house is the herb garden. If I am
kicking myself over anything in this bed, it is that I did not label my
plants. So I really have very little idea of which herbs I have planted
here. Some are obvious, but others are not so much. I should take
cuttings down to my local Extension Office and have them identify each
herb I have. I think next spring I will dig this bed up and resow my
herbs, making sure to properly mark everything.

Like
the other bed, I had dawn up a plan for this bed, but after losing a
couple of flats of herbs that were supposed to be in this bed, I started
just 'winging' it, so my plans aren't entirely helpful in identifying
everything. I know I have Lemongrass, Oregano, Bronze Fennel, Thyme,
Chives, Cilantro, Spring Onions, Mints and African Blue Basil. I had
other basils, but for some reason they did not fair very well this
year. I again attribute this to the lack of natural rainfall.

This
bed is rather narrow, but it doesn't have to be terribly big. As much
as I love cooking with my own fresh herbs, once these herbs got really
going, I haven't been able to keep up with them. If only my flats of
parsley and sage hadn't died on me... c'est la vie.

African Blue Basil. Everything you have heard about this plant is true. It is easy to care for, tastes great in dishes, has a nice aroma when you brush it, is constantly blooming and is an absolute magnet for bees.

This is my daughter's old Butterfly Garden. As noted in various other posts, for whatever reason, this bed never attracted butterflies. It had all the right plants, but something about it just kept them away. As such, I took it back from her and have decided to make this a 'pretty' bed. I moved in a few plants that I will consider as my 'structure' plants, but for the most part I haven't fully decided what will go here. I did try a Princess Flower Tree here, but I think the area got too much sun and the young tree finally gave up and died. I also had my Coral Honeysuckle growing up the blue obelisk, but it had grown so strongly, that it had completely lifted the obelisk out of the ground and even separated the pieces. So I had to cut back the Honeysuckle and anchor the obelisk a little more solidly into place. The Honeysuckle is returning, but I don't expect it to be blooming size again until next spring.

The North Side of my house. The bane of my limited gardening experience. In deep shade during the winter and bathed in sun from sunrise to sunset in the summer. Despite the plants, I have done very little with this side. Most of the plants, aside from the grasses and shrubs, are from deadheading other plants and dropping the cutoffs along this side to see what would come up on their own.

And the reason I haven't done much with this side, aside from my limited plant knowledge, is that I am waiting on these shrubs. After seeing Sweet Viburnums (the two on either side of the central Wax Myrtle) limbed up into small, dense trees at the Discovery Gardens, I decided that was what I needed here. As they grow, I will be training them to each grown in a vase-like shape and their branches will eventually meet up with the Wax Myrtle. This should put this section of my little strip of land into deep shade, even during the summer, and I can stop worrying about what plants will tolerate both sun and shade and just focus on shade plants.

Also along the north wall is this lovely Beautyberry bush. When I had first read about this plant, I read different accounts about how birds used it in winter. Books said that birds loved the berries, but other gardeners kept saying that the birds only touched them 'as a last resort when all else is gone'. Well, last winter, I saw that one bird in particular did indeed enjoy these berries. The migrating flocks of Bluebirds from up north were all over my multiple Beautyberry bushes and cleaned them off in about a week. Which did surprise me a bit as I had thought Bluebirds were very much insectivorous. The bush pictured here is just below my kitchen window, so during the summer months I can see the pinkish flowers waving in the wind, and during the winter I get to watch the Bluebirds while preparing lunch or dinner.

While I had various plants come up from seeds spread long this wall, few are as interesting to me as the Standing Cypress. Every time I see them in bloom I want to build a bed almost solely dedicated to them or at least where they will be the star performers... Perhaps that is what I will do with the afore mentioned 'pretty bed'.

And as nice as the red standing cypress is, it is these creme-colored variations that tend to really catch my eye. If there is any plant I want to take a stab at with self pollinating to design blooms, it is this plant. You can bet I will be collecting seeds from this plant come autumn.

And now on to the first plot of land that I ever tried to turn into a bed. When I look back at my older pictures, it is amazing to me just how much it has changed. It is also amazing to me that it is the least completed of all the beds.

As you can really see in this picture, and others to follow, I have really taken to using the native Fakahatchee grass as the structure points of my beds. To my mind, they just look like they belong. And as any poetic garden show host might say, it really is a pleasure to watch them sway when the breezes blow through... which is often in Florida. There's just something calming about it.

One of the biggest hurdles of this bed is that it is in the Northwest corner of my lot, so it is the most exposed area of the yard in regards to the blasting northern winds in winter. As such this is always the first bed to show the effects of when the cold nights come in. Some might say turn it into an annuals bed where I would have warm season annuals during the summer and more cold-hardy annuals for the winter. But I like my beds to have a sense of permanence. If there are annuals in my beds, then they are annuals that will reseed themselves and come back the following year. I don't want to be bothered with having to redesign a bed every season, the beds should more or less take care of themselves as they mature. To this end, I have been trying to get plants in this bed that will provide structure and shelter to more tender plants. Being on a budget, this means it will be another few years before I see that structure and shelter come into being.

In the absolute Northwest corner of the lot my daughter and I built her new butterfly garden. As you can see, shortly after building the bed she gave up interest in it. There are actually a few perennials planted here, but they did their thing in spring and have now receded back. She also sowed some coneflower seeds, but they haven't taken yet. Perhaps they are just waiting for the right conditions or perhaps they were duds. The pots hold some of my Sweet Acacia seedlings.

The western side of my house has been given over to a small pond. Being that I am on rented property, I had absolutely no intention of putting in a pond. I just wasn't going to spend that kind of money on something that wouldn't go with me when we get our own land. As it was, another resident of the ranch packed up and moved out and when they did, they left behind their pond. The park manager at the time wanted the weed-choked mosquito oasis gone and asked me if I wanted it. So I took it. A free pond isn't wasted money, right? You can also see one of my biggest problems. A complete lack of organization. Or should I say a completely lack of being able to stay organized. I come out here every other month to straighten things up, but within a couple weeks I will have things strewn about again.

One of the first things my wife said after I put the pond in was, "I want Koi!" Unfortunately I had to quickly burst that particular dream bubble as the pond is no where near big enough to house koi. But we did get some pet store goldfish. Of course, this meant we soon had an abundance of nutrients in the water which means we soon had bunch of green algae. At first I tried using chemical means of combating the algae, but that turned out to be a weekly thing and I didn't like the idea of having to buy bottle after bottle of the algae killer and I didn't like having to keep subjecting the fish to the stuff, even if it was fish safe. So instead, I switched to using plants. As my water plants have been maturing, the amount of green algae has been slowly decreasing.

I have been planting up the western fence line with plants to help create a bit of a wind break during winter. The large Beautyberry bush itself will not do much wind breaking as it is deciduous, but I am hoping as the pines on either side of it continue to grow, they will create a bit of a break. I doubt I will be here long enough to see them come to maturity, but the next person should have some good 'high pine shade' during the summer months.

Also planted along the fence line is my Sea Myrtle. While the seed that volunteered itself into my yard could have come from anywhere, I like to think that given it came up in an area where I often wash off our beach stuff, that the seed hitched a ride after one of our trips to the beach. It is about two years old and I have yet to see it bloom, but it is supposed to have little clouds of white flowers on it when it does. Below the Sea Myrtle is one of my transplanted Spotted Bee Balms. A quick 'head's up!' about Spotted Bee Balm, once you plant it, you will have lots of it. Which isn't completely a bad thing. It is a nicely scented flower that really brings in the pollinators in autumn and it isn't hard to pull up, it just likes to reseed itself. Prolifically.

My small Wildflower bed is the bed that has the most interest for me. This is the bed that I more or less let go to reseeds and volunteers. I added Beautyberry, Wax Myrtle, Lovegrass and the Fakahatchee grasses to help set up the structure of the bed, but other than that I let nature do it's thing. If there is a type of wildflower I would like to see in the bed, I might sprinkle some seeds, but I don't do a lot of active planting and sowing.

In the spring of 2014, I helped my kids build some Bluebird boxes and one of them was put in here. We were rewarded when a pair of Bluebirds moved in in short order and have yet to leave. Well, sort of. Since we have such a small yard, it was hard to find a place to put up the second Bluebird box, so we ended up getting permission from a neighbor to put one up in her yard. Since then our Bluebirds have migrated back and forth between the two boxes and will aggressively defend both even though they are separated by almost 200 yds. I am thinking one reason for the indecision might be due to the Beautyberry bush growing next to the box. I was curious if having a plant growing so close to the nest would bother them and I wonder if I might be seeing signs of just that. At the end of each winter, I cut my Beautyberries back to about 12" from the ground to encourage them to grow so full, so I don't expect this bush to get much bigger than it is, but it will be interesting and educational to watch how the maturity of the bush affects the pair.

While the Wildflower bed looks like it is mulched with the same tree trimmings I used for all my beds, it really isn't. I used a 3" deep mound of trimmings to create the outer border of the bed and then gave the rest of the bed a light 'dusting' of chips. This way it looks like it is mulched like the other beds, but it still gives reseeds a chance to germinate on their own. The group of Mystic Spires at the end of the Wildflower bed are obviously not reseeds/volunteers. They were rescues from the 'throwing away' rack of a garden shop and are the parent plants from which I took cuttings that now reside in my Eastern bed at the beginning of this post. That's a lot of plants for 50c/pot. While they aren't really wildflowers, I leave them here just to keep the pollinators in the area when there aren't many actual wildflowers growing.

Partridge Pea is one of my favorites of the wildflower bed. It reseeds itself into the bed, but not overly much. Each year I get a few of them coming up just to say, "Hey, we're still here!" This is one of the native host plants of Sulphur Butterflies, though they do seem to prefer laying eggs on my cassia to laying eggs on this. One of the nice bonuses of Partidge Pea is that it is a legume, so it makes a nice addition to the compost heap when it is done doing its thing.

Blanketflower is a must for any wildflower garden, but what I have found interesting since spreading seed in this bed is that the wildflower version is a bit lankier and has fewer blooms than the types you usually find seeds for. Yes, that is more Spotted Bee Balm behind the Blanketflower. It was in this bed that I first spread seeds for Spotted Bee Balm and had it let it completely alone, this entire bed would be nothing but Spotted Bee Balm. This is why I can't leave the bed completely to it's own devices. I have to check on it at least once a month to make sure nothing is growing that I don't want (Spanish Needles) and that nothing is spreading too much.

Not really a wildflower, my mother had wanted me to grow some Blue Butterfly Pea vines for her and when I read that they could be a host plant for Longtail Skippers, I decided to toss some seeds under the bird bath in this bed. One of those seeds germinated and started to grow up the leg of that birdbath. It will be interesting to see if this manages to reseed itself in the same spot.

And now for my Shrub Bed. A bed that is doing so well that one doesn't even notice the Crazy Cat People's house next door anymore (look at older pics). This bed was built solely for the purpose of killing the west winds during winter and helping to set up the micro climate for my Tropical Bed. Still, I didn't want to throw any old shrubs into this bed nor did I want it to be just a bunch of foliage. It is hard to see in this picture, but there are about 6 or 7 separate shrubs here. I have two Simpson Stoppers, three dwarf Walter's Viburnums, a Wax Myrtle, two Blueberries and two Gold Mound Durantas. So that's 10 shrubs Mike. Learn to count. Since this is on the south side of my house, I didn't want to plant trees as allowing the sun to hit my house during winter is a good thing. I just don't want the winds to blow through.

Another purpose the Shrub Bed is to be a center of bird activity. It just seemed to make sense that if you have a bed dedicated to shrubs, those shrubs should be a benefit to birds. Along with the berry producing shrubs, I keep a feeder and two ground-level birdbaths. The feeders bring in the common seed eating birds like Cardinals, Chickadees, Titmice and Finches, but with all the woodchips as mulch and the birdbaths, I also get other small birds that come to poke around all the debris for insects. Unfortunately, not many of them seem to enjoy eating snails.

One of the most common flowers in my Shrub Bed is the Mexican Sunflower. This is another flower that once you plant it, you will have it until you decide to get rid of it. The plant itself is an annual, but it flowers and seeds so much that the chances of it reseeding are very much in its favor. I even had volunteers from plants in this bed come up in my herb bed on the other side of the house. Luckily the seedlings are very easy to identify and pull. Still, it is an absolute favorite of butterflies, so I leave some of them to grow and flower.

One of many reasons I love the naturalistic style of gardening is how the borders and paths work together. Even though I know this path that separates the Shrub Bed from the Tropical Bed is short, even though I know that these beds are small, the way that this path gets blocked from view by the lemongrass makes it at least look like it could be bigger than it is. If/when my shrubs mature, the visual illusion will be all the more effective. That said, the lemongrass on the left side of the path is actually a bit too close and hangs over half the pathway, which means if it has rained anytime recently, my legs are sure to get a good soaking.

What a feast for the eye! Beautiful.

The Tropical Bed is the one big exception to my yard. This is the one bed where the number of native plants are very few. In fact I think the number of natives in this bed is just one. The Firebush in the center. It is also the one bed in my yard that has been hurt the most by the lack of rainfall this spring/summer. While everything here is living, none of them are as far along as they were last year around this time. The notable exceptions would be the bananas and the lemongrass. Right now the stage is still being set for this bed. As the Shrub Bed continues to mature, I will be changing up the planting here to add more of those vibrant and scented tropical flowers and less greenery.
One of my favorite accidents is on the left side of my Tropical bed. While I intentionally planted the Christmas Senna with the Gold Mound Duranta, I did not at the time fully understand what this planting would do. In the months of November and December, the Christmas Senna goes into bloom and almost seems to mirror the Duranta below it. It really does create a pretty cool visual effect. And now I have Carolina Jessamine growing up through Senna. Since the Senna isn't a particularly strong tree, I will have to keep an eye on the Jessamine and make sure it doesn't get too much for the tree.
One of the bigger disappointments of this summer has been the Firebush in the Tropical Bed. Again, I believe it has more to do with our lack of rain than anything else, but this shrub is only a quarter of the size that it was this time last year and it had a bigger head start this year as the entire stem did not die back during winter. Still, I maintain that if you want to see Zebra Longwings in your garden, you should plant a Firebush (Hamelia patens). It took longer this year for it to bloom, but once the flowers started, the Zebra Longwings were everywhere.
One of the new additions to my yard this year is Crocosmia 'Lucifer'. At least, the tag said this was supposed to be Lucifer. The pictures I have seen of Lucifer often look a bit more red than what I have. Regardless of if it is indeed Lucifer, it is an attractive flower to have in the Tropical Bed and the hummingbirds enjoy drinking from it. Crocosmia spreads by a rhizome and can supposedly become a bit of a thug if allowed to spread as it will. In the interest of maintaining a Florida-Friendly status, I put all my Crocosmias in pots and then sunk the pots into the bed, by doing this the plant will hopefully be prevented from spreading beyond the boundaries of the pot.

Michael

Wonderful tour of your garden, it seems that every space is filled with your favorite plants, thank you for taking the time to post and letting us know about your gardening adventures.

Silvia

Michael, thanks for your detailed posting and all the photos! I enjoyed your tour. You and your daughter have put so much work into all sides of your garden! You have some plants I'd forgotten about that I'm now going to try again come spring. Thanks for bringing them back to memory.

Silvia, good to 'see' you again!

Ana

Ana!!!! I missed you, I am so glad that you are back again!. In the garden world, you are one of my favorite posters and teacher, thanks for coming back.

Silvia

Wow what a great variety of plants. You have put a lot of thought & effort into your garden beds. The Spanish needles take over everything real fast but the butterflies & bees seem to love them. Ends up as a darned if you pull them darned if you don't.

Thanks for sharing a tour with all the great pics.

Craig

Thank you for the kind words folks. When I go out to outside with my critical eye, I can see lots of mistakes and/or problems. But for me gardening is one part creative oulet, two parts mental therapy and two parts physical therapy. If I start stressing about how each bed looks, I lose the mental therapy part.

Also, my mother is the better photographer and I had intended to get her to come shoot the garden. And perhaps I still will. Going through this post and noting my typos, I also noted that I could almost do a tour of each bed and give each plant their own time in the spotlight, so to speak. It would not be something done quickly, because I would want each plant shot when they are flowering and at their best, instead of like now when everything tends to blend into a mound of green.

But again, thank you.

This morning my Wild Petunia was blooming so well that I figured I would give it a little spotlight time. For anyone not familiar with it, Wild Petunia (Ruellia caroliniensis) is the native cousin of the invasive Mexican Petunia. It is a shorter plant, but as you can see, the blooms are similar in color. I do not know the blooming habits of Mexican Petunia, but this one, for me, starts blooming in late spring, opens up each morning and by 1pm they tend to be washed out and dropping petals. But the next morning there will be a new group of flowers. Cutting off about two nodes each month causes the plants to spread and support more blooms per plant.

Thank you for sharing your lovely garden tour. It was neat to hear the different plant descriptions and the evolution of the beds. If you need help with the herbs you library may carry a herb identification book. The wild petunia looks very nice.

"Thank you for the kind words folks. When I go out to outside with my critical eye, I can see lots of mistakes and/or problems. But for me gardening is one part creative oulet, two parts mental therapy and two parts physical therapy. If I start stressing about how each bed looks, I lose the mental therapy part."

Michael, I think most of us here feel the same way about gardening. It is all about creating and nurturing something and losing yourself in the process. For me, it is a spiritual thing also.

Love the wild petunia. It is really looking pretty.

Silvia, thanks for your comments. You are too kind. I got out of the habit of coming here. I'm going to try to stick around more. I miss your posts and have learned sooooooo much from you. I still have a small veggie garden and always think of you when I have questions or when something is doing well. You are an incredible and generous teacher. Thanks for loving to give your knowledge!

Michael, that petunia is very pretty!

Ana, thank you for your kind comments. It is going to be wonderful to see your postings and knowing that you are back again makes me happy.

Silvia

Ah, Michael, your garden and related experiences are such studies in Florida gardening! Wish I could see your gardens, years down the road, already!