Landscaping with Florida Native Plants in Northeast Florida
If you are looking to make your NE Florida Landscape a haven for local birds, bees, butterflies, and other pollinators you have come to the right place. Native plants provide food and shelter for so many of our local wildlife species and making your home a hospitable environment full of native and Florida friendly landscape plants can help you turn your landscape into your favorite local park. My absolute favorite place to be on this planet is my yard and its mostly due not to the fact that I am a self proclaimed hermit, although I’m sure that helps, but the wildlife that my plants attract. There are birds chirping butterflies fluttering about and little pollinators moving from plant to plant literally everywhere you look. I heard it said that when you see snakes in your garden you know you are back to being part of the local ecosystem. Seeing life in the garden you’ve put together is so rewarding. How fun is it when you see a little baby lizard just hatched staring back at you from your flower? How exciting is spotting a new species in your backyard that had yet to visit. After 30 years of home gardening I just got a new butterfly last week! It was an orange barred Sulphur butterfly! I jumped up out of my rocking chair like nobody’s business! I didn’t get a very good photo but IT WAS SOOO FAST! How exciting was that? Then yesterday when I was putting out arborist chips I had a cardinal and his mate in my magnolia Tree! No video or pictures of that one but I got to stop what I was doing and admire them for a bit.
A few words of Caution to this tale…
Native plants are going to need to be the right plant for the right place in order to thrive in the landscape. That is just an all around good gardening practice in general but with native plants it can be even more important. Often times landscape plants are popular because a landscaper can install it without worrying about you killing it, basically their wider adaptability makes them able to tolerate neglect, or sometimes they have no local insect populations that feed on them as a food source making then pretty pest free in our garden spaces where a native plant may not.
It seems sort of counter intuitive right, after all native landscape plants thrive without our care in our climate for thousands of years haven’t they? The short answer is YES! The long answer is yes, native plants are still here after thousands of years in Florida because they were very well suited to grow in very specific areas. They will for the most part be found in areas that are more exactly suited to their needs with the right kinds of soil, moisture, rainfall, sun exposure and even elevations that suit them. Did you know that vegetation changes with the elevation…pretty cool right?
The last bit of caution to this tale of wildlife paradise right in your own backyard is native plants that thrive in areas well suited to them do exactly that. They thrive! And part of that process of thriving means that they may be capable of aggressive even excessive growth and reproduction in areas that suit them well. So possibly thicket forming shrubs form you guessed it, thickets… increasingly wider areas of vegetation growing pretty close together that may become a bit impenetrable or seemingly unmanageable if left to themselves over time. Or you may plant a native plant that may aggressively seed into other areas of the landscape that also suit them. You may find your native plant journey being more of a walk in the wild side and less of an easy care plant solution than you had originally anticipated. Remember easy to maintain does not equal easy to contain. Those are two very different things. If a wilder, or more natural looking space is not appealing to you maybe choose your native plant selections with caution. I’ll try to be as transparent as possible with my videos and descriptions of my experiences with my native plant selections so you can better know what your dealing with.
Hopefully in the pages that follow we can, like with our Florida friendly landscape plant selections, get you the right plant for the right place and for the right purpose. As a Florida nurseryman for nearly three decades, every single time I’m helping a customer it is my goal to suit the right plant for the right person and to the right location! We always want to take into account a persons goals for their space as well as the time and energy they are willing to put into a plants care and last but definitely not least the space they are working with.