Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Take a Hike Ike

We are breathing a sigh of relief to see Hurricane Ike take its huge self away from us on a western trajectory. Woe is Texas, though. The outer rain bands left us a good amount of rain and some wind, but we're not complaining. We got off easy.

This week we were excited to accept some unusual fruit trees for the future Garden. Stephen Brady, a local tropical fruit guru, donated 5 Chinese che (Cudrania tricuspidata). The leaves of this little fruit tree were used in China to feed silkworms when mulberry wasn't available. The fruit is said to be shaped a bit like a mulberry crossed with a lychee (see attached photo). According to Steve, the fruit tastes like a combination of watermelon and fig. We look forward to trying them for ourselves.

Speaking of odd fruits, have you sampled the Garden's peanut butter fruit? In the Fruit and Spice area, we have a peanut butter tree (Bunchosia argentea). At this very moment it has clusters of bright orange fruit. When the fruit is fully ripe and soft, the texture and flavor are slightly reminiscent of peanut butter. You can imagine what a hit it is with young visitors.

Another donation came from Ronald Rumbaugh, the former Parks Director of Miami Beach. If you will recall, he donated four baobab trees (Adansonia sp). This time around he donated a highly prized licuala palm (Licuala sp). This slow-growing palm has circular fronds that are evocative of the tropics.

The most recent travels of the horticulture staff took them to Searle Brothers Nursery in Southwest Ranches. There Jeff Searle donated 15 tropical palms for the future Gardens. Among the palms brought back were dwarf fishtail palm (Wallichia densiflora), Sagisi palm (Heterospathe elata), toddy palm (Caryota urens) and rootspine palm (Cryosophila warscewiczii). Besides palms, Jeff Searle also specializes in Ti (Cordyline sp) plants. He generously donated 20 or so rare varieties. These beauties are as eye-catching as some of their names—‘Pink Diamond,’ ‘Rising Sun,’ ‘Diamond Sunrise,’ and ‘Wilis Gold.’

A trip to ECHO (Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization) in north Ft. Myers introduced the horticulture staff to the challenges of extreme gardening. ECHO's mission is to help families grow food crops in areas with difficult conditions. Their demonstration garden is divided into 6 areas: tropical highlands, urban rooftops, tropical monsoon, tropical rainforest, semi-arid tropics, and hot humid lowlands. They send their interns into the world to educate families about crops that they can grow with a single packet of seed. Their agriculture consultant Larry Yarger rolled out the red carpet for our visit, and we hope they'll visit the Garden soon so we can show them what we're up to. If you haven't been to ECHO or haven't been in the last couple years, you're in for a surprise. When you go, don’t miss the store, which has great books and seeds, and the well-stocked tropical fruit nursery. Check them out at www.echonet.org.

Next time you're at the Garden, if you hear a steady buzzing overhead, it might be aerial mosquito spraying, but it’s more likely a hive of honeybees. These busy little guys and girls (actually workers and drones) have established themselves high up in the fronds of the foxtail palms (Wodyetia bifurcata) right off the visitor parking lot. They're not bothering anyone so we're not going to bother them. In fact, they're helping us by pollinating the flowers at the Garden. Just think of them as volunteers!

A plant blooming for the first time in recent memory caught our attention: Augusta rivalis. This particular evergreen shrub isn't much to look at but its flowers are white trumpets that are super fragrant. It's nestled in the same bed as the ylang ylang (Cananga fruticosa) directly outside the herbarium. We have two others in the nursery that are also flowering. By the way, the ylang ylang is outdoing itself this year. Its branches are draped with those floppy yellow petals whose lovely fragrance is simply intoxicating.


Raymond Jungles, the landscape architect for our future Brazilian Garden, has a new book coming out in October: The Colors of Nature: Subtropical Gardens by Raymond Jungles. The front cover has an image from Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (see attached photo). The back cover shows the Key West garden of Judy Blume, a well-known children's book author.
Movement is afoot to launch our life-long learning lecture and workshop series. David Webb, the new education manager, is organizing a lineup of topics and speakers that are sure to get you back to the Garden. This program is tentatively scheduled to start in November and run to April, with two events per month. If you've got an idea for a topic or know of any expert, drop David an email at dwebb@naplesgarden.org.

Next week all you Garden fans are going to have to go without. I'm off to Portland, OR, for the Garden Writers Symposium. The favorite topic is always--you guessed it--plants, but they'll also be talking about blogs, newsletters, "green" products, and trends in gardening. Then we traipse around to private gardens, botanical gardens, garden centers, nurseries--same as what I do here in Florida--only these are in Portland.

The next Tropical Mosaic Garden visit is this coming week, Wednesday, September 17th. If you're in the neighborhood, check us out between 9am and noon.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Follow the Expansion Right Here

The unveiling of the new website finally happened this week. New York-based ESI did a bang-up job designing the website. The most exciting part is the slide show of construction photos that lets you see the progress of the construction and expansion.

The blogs should be great, too. Brian Holley has his own—the Director’s blog; of course, there’s mine—called the Gardens blog. Chad Washburn, natural areas manager, will be writing the Preserve blog. The Community Forest blog has potential—it allows readers to post information and images of trees they are growing for the future Garden or their own personal garden photos. Of course, any website lives and dies on its currency. Amy Kessler, communications manager, is charged with feeding the monster. The Gardens blog will be my weekly contribution.

In the meantime, while we hold our breath waiting for hurricanes Hanna, Ike and Josephine, it’s been a mostly dry, brutally humid week. The main irrigation lake has returned to its normal level. We continue with the summer routine of renewal pruning and thinning. This week the Burgundy Border and Pink Courtyard were tamed. At its prime, the Burgundy Border was a lovely collage of the pink and purple hues of variegation provided by various alcalyphas. Alcalyphas are sometimes called copperleaf, but that’s a misnomer, as the genus includes a wide range of colors and color combinations.

In the Pink Courtyard, the tropical snowballs (Dombeya spp.) had out grown their space. We have two hybrids—the smaller growing and dark-pink flowering D. burgessiae ‘Seminole Pink’ and one we suspect is D. wallichii. The Philodendron ‘Burle Marx’ was well on its way to blocking the entrance to the Windstar Garden Room as it scrambled across the brick. The coral creeper (Barleria repens), that coral flowering groundcover along the walkway to the Welcome Center, has always been unruly. Its mass has been reduced considerably and for the moment is under control.

This time of year we also do non-horticultural housecleaning. Two days are set aside to organize and clean offices and garages. That went a little faster this year as we only had one garage to empty out (having turning the other one, the former horticulture garage, over to Kraft Construction’s command central). We even made some headway in the horticulture office, discovering surfaces we’d forgotten were there.

I have been remiss in not mentioning that the Garden enjoyed a visit by an international star of the plant kingdom—David Mabberley, one of the foremost botanists of our time. He is perhaps best known for his invaluable plant dictionary, The Plant-Book. He has been described as a renowned plant systematist and botanical historian whose interests are wide-ranging and include economic botany, the tropical flora, and botanical art history. In March of this year he was appointed Keeper of the Herbarium, Library, Art and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. A few staffers and board members joined David for socializing and dinner one evening in mid-August—the following day Brian Holley gave him a personal tour of our Garden.

Friday, September 5, 2008

The Orchid House Gets an Extreme Makeover

Our makeshift orchid house, while temporary, is providing staff and volunteers with a testing ground for orchid growing and maintenance. Volunteer Tony Donzello built two tables and put up more poles for hanging plants. The irrigation has been adjusted to allow the orchid-side of the house to dry out while watering the seedlings and non-orchids on the other side. Potting materials—charcoal, moss, coconut husks, Epsom salts, potassium nitrate, and liquid fertilizer—are close by in containers. Our bible for orchid growing is Martin Motes Florida Orchid Growing Month by Month. Volunteer Sandy Catron is overseeing the effort.

We welcomed a large trumpet tree (Tabebuia impetiginosa), a gift from Bob Peterson that was planned as a donation down the line but, once uprooted by Fay’s winds, came early. It’s now in our holding area with Gumby (the sea-faring gumbo limbo, Bursera simaruba) and a growing number of trees that have been donated.

The new nursery there has filled up quickly. Nursery foreman Kurt Van de Wouw has it all set up with irrigation on a large expanse of ground cloth. The banana collection hardly skipped a beat after being dug up from the other location and moved. You can almost see them grow with recent generous rains.

Brian Galligan, horticulture manager, and Carolyn Miller, curator of collections, returned recently from a trip to the east coast, where they visited with Don Evans, the former director of horticulture at Fairchild Botanic Garden. While in the Homestead area, they stopped by Bloomin’ Good, a nursery specializing in flowering trees. They came back with nearly 50 unusual and rare plants, including a new cultivar of tropical dogwood called Marmalade (Mussaenda ‘Marmalade’), a rare Philippine fig (Ficus pseudopalma), and cutting-edge butterfly tree (Erblichia odorata), which has large orange flowers that smell like apricots.

We joined up with the Croton Society at their August 16th meeting in Bradenton. It was held at a collector’s house and culminated in a raffle of palms and crotons, from which I brought back two crotons--- ‘Princess Diana’, which gets jumbo sunny-yellow paddle leaves, and Magesticum, which has strappy leaves mottled in a rainbow of colors (Codiaeum ‘Majesticum’ and C. ‘Princess Diana’).

We bid a sad farewell to Eric Van Arsdale this week. He has worked all summer with natural areas manager Chad Washburn. Eric returns to Brown University as a sophomore to continue studying environmental science. It was nice to have a kid around. We hope he visits often.

Wednesday, August 17th , the public was invited to stroll the Tropical Mosaic Garden. Thanks to volunteers Dave Catron, Patsy Sachs and Tony Donzello–they were very busy and most accommodating for our 50 or so visitors. Tony helped with set up and clean up, Patsy learned some new plants and kept the cookies and drinks coming from the kitchen, and Dave (aka Super Dave) spent the entire time out in the garden answering questions about plants. My “what’s in bloom” guide proved to be good reference. The Windstar Garden Room’s ‘face lift’ enlivened the interior landscape. The next public visit will be September 17th.