Plant Sale this weekend.

It's really too much! The two Jasmine trees are just LOADED! Frangipani also going to town (in a stationary way...). The Jasmines are not only blooming to the max, but letting the petals drift down. The best kind of (Florida) snow! Picked some flowers to give. Come and get some at plant sale this weekend.

(oh yea: had to be told to post this!):
110 Zephyr Rd. Venice 34293

Our Gardens Sybil and J. Venice Florida

Our Gardens Sybil and J. Venice, Florida January 2000

Smiling Sybil welcomed us as we poured out of the van and stood taking in the lush, sculptured front yard. A lovely semicircle of hibiscus bordered the driveway. Sybil and J. planted everything we saw growing in that front yard. When they moved here from Manhattan about five years ago, it was all grass, oaks and palms.

The garden today looks as if this is how it's always been. In our first minutes together, Sybil generously offered cuttings, seeds, anything we might be interested in. We started our tour in the front yard, where "wild'; orchids, Epidendrum radicans, blew reddish-orangeish.

There was a Jacaranda (purple flowers so extraordinary that streets, towns, neighborhoods are named for them), and orchid trees grown from seeds. Around the side of the house, we came upon a Neem tree. Jamaican-lilted Sybil shared that in Sri Lanka they believe vapors of this plant have healing properties.

Do the math: Sybil's Caribbean roots + Sybil's and J.'s membership in the Fruit and Nut Society = Slow Going: Unusual and yummy edibles wherever we wandered on this acre-size lot. I'd still be grazing if I hadn't been nudged occasionally. A pretty vine ran around amongst the greenery. Vegetarian bowling balls? No! They're Jamaican pumpkins. I lugged home a couple of hunks, as part of the Fabulous Parting Gifts. Time has passed. I'm updating this article years later… those lovely pumpkins scattered themselves through my garden for years, coming back and back. I had parties, served pumpkin soup. Then the plants and fruits stopped coming and the seeds I had grew old and now I'm bereft of pumpkins… Anyway, there were peach trees, fig and blooming ginger. There was the banana grove, of course, and scallions, lemon grass, persimmon, kumquat and Jamaican spinach. There was a strawberry tree... which smells like its namesake and forks over red berries.

Sybil's husband J. - That's how he spells it. I've gathered those cast off letters to spell MY name… - joined us as we rambled. Asked if he gardens with Sybil, he answered tactfully and tenderly, "Oh, we do different things.. .I'm only the engineer. She's the agronomist." He's a retired engineer, mentions he's gotten her to come in from the shed for a phone call by using cans and string. He calls her My Love. We saw his influence in the fabulous shade house where part of the orchid collection resides. More of the orchid collection surrounded the screened-in pool. Sybil and J.'s place proudly wears a "Florida Yards and Neighborhoods" sign. This is a program originally started to protect our waters, but has grown to recognize sites meeting certain basic ecologically correct (and I have to say totally PICKY) criteria. (Did you guess? I don't have the sign at my garden…) If you notice this sign in front of a home, you know there must be some interesting gardening going on there. In fact, if you notice a GARDEN - just anywhere you notice gardening going on - you can safely assume that there will be imagination and passion, experimentation and FUN in the vicinity, as well. I say, feel free to drop in. Just look at J. and Sybil's! I'm sure you'll be welcomed.

Contact Andye at 941-497-5282 if you have a garden you would like to share with our readers.

Snail flinging.

Dewy morning. Saw one snail next to the toppled pepper plant, so knew there'd be more. Donned my Michael Jackson uni-glove, got my brass collecting pot and picked the suckers off by the dozens. Then to the driveway, where I dumped the pot from my height. whap, whap, whappp... Pretty yucky, but better than the salt/melty wicked witch protocol. The lie to the broken-hearted/disgusted grandbabes: This is where they come to get their new shells, (kind of a slimey Macy's).

This May day in my Florida garden.

Looks like it may be stormy later, but right now, the air is electric. Just saw a pair of cardinals (Mr. and Mrs. C). He was the reddest red I've ever seen. The old ricrac cactus I moved to the back yard under the oaks is about to bloom, too. Guess it WAS getting too much sun. This is a picture of when it bloomed years ago.

If Molly didn't have my camera somewhere in Europe, I'd have to show you the frangipani/ plumeria/ Hawaiin lei flower tree outside my bedroom window. It's just blooming its fool head off. The air is literally perfumed! It's almost dizzying! (My father used to say, don't ever let them give you anesthesia, because they won't be able to tell the difference - so dizzy might be subjective here...).

Houseplants Gone Wild

Or
You really CAN Go Home Again

This is Paradise: Florida - where escapees from past lives of pampered prissiness in the rarified atmosphere of, well, hothouse flowers - come to GO WILD! Welcome to Paradise! You’re HOME! Now get outside! No need to wipe your feet. Just plant ‘em.

Phil O Dendron. You’ve got the top bunk. Climb right on up into the tree canopy. Yo! Snake! (I’m from Joizey originally¼), Ms Dieffenbachia! There’s the shade. Stay put and be quiet! You fancy Orchids, you’ll be hanging around in that oak. No sweat. No greenhouse torpor. Relax. You’ve come to the right place. See you next week!

Coleus! Shade or sun? Your choice. Begonia! Impatience! Cool it. Iris, take the plunge in the pond. (You seem different, somehow!) Herb! Didn’t think you’d make it but there you are, feet in the sand, basking in the sun. If you don’t want to get down and dirty, you can pull up a pot. If you come on too strong, you’d best stay in that pot. I’ll water you more often, if you insist. It’s my pleasure, really.

Rose! WATCH OUT! There are spider plants creeping around your feet!

What I’m trying to say is that here in sunny southern ( middle, western) Florida, houseplants we spent fevered hours acclimatizing do quite well turned loose on the outside. No more: Which window? - What exposure does this need? - If I mist, will it bloom? Do you think this new curly hose thingy will stretch across the house? – Here is where genetic memories beckon from the goo of collective pasts. At last Flora has returned to her birthplace from the miles and millennia.

And Yes: Memory still exists. Impaired, fuzzy around the edges, ‘way the worse for wear and tear, but here it is. Pay no attention to those rotting floors and those mushrooms sprouting in that musty corner behind the plant tray! (It really happened!) I also had Swedish ivy rooted to the baseboard of my old Vista Cruiser, stowed away, while en route to a “plant party” years ago. It might have been that same party wherein I transported a lizard to this nice lady’s living room amongst the plants for sale, where it deplaned (DE Plane! DE Plane!) and set a room full of women screaming and scurrying for their lives. It started innocently enough with one dowager exclaiming: “There’s a FROG on the wall!!!!”

I had a dome greenhouse back then, accumulated from the ex’s pool business. This was the site of much passion. Not between aforementioned 23rd letter and your devoted memory-less auteur. (unless I just can’t remember, and then just how passionate could it have been?). Anyway: Aunt Alice was visiting and became the unfortunate voyeur to the tryst of a couple of snakes. (reptilian, not herbaceous or matrimonial ) (repeat the shriek: “There’s a FROG on the wall!!!”)

In that domed greenhouse, I nurtured a Passionvine. I don’t remember how it came into my possession: This was the ‘70s in New Jersey. But there it bloomed in all its kaleidoscopic wonder. That greenhouse was a major loss when x stopped marking the spot and the kids and I moved down here to Venice.

Another bittersweet memory lights the corner of my gardeny consciousness: My lovely compost pile. Formed like the mashed potato mountain in Close Encounters from said unconsciousness and topped, (no kidding) with a giant bocce ball sized, doo ball. I had accumulated my pile’s crowning glory after watching it drop right out of the wrong end of an elephant, when the circus came to town and the girls and I went Trick-or-Treating. (It wasn’t Halloween but I took plastic bags to beg some tiger bedding/deer repellant(?) and whatever circus stuff they’d give me to add to my garden. (The girls refused to get into the car with the very intense-smelling stuff). Anyway – the elephant’s contribution topped the compost pile, a steaming, eventually dried out cherry on top, direct from the elephant to me. I used to walk around that compost pile meditating. (Again, I blame the 70s, and the 60s for that matter...) It was the center of the garden. Heaven’s bull’s-eye. So. I’m walking and breathing deep when all of a sudden, there’s a very big (about the size of a half-dollar) flat stone of pink quartz crystal in my hand. (60s). But it really was there! And I owned it until we made the move down here. I have a picture of the pile. I’ll show it to you.! Look again at the beginning of this post! Look closely!

(But I digress. Kind of. We moved to Venice now over a decade ago. That same year Venice lost the circus. This was the circus’ winter home and the elephants used to take part in the home-town Christmas parades down Main Street. So I lost the elephant connection Big Time that first year.)

But the Passionvines bloom here all year long, each a three-dimensional miracle. There are passion fruits hanging on the vine, the pony tail palms and Sheffleras bloom and the skies are not cloudy all day. Bananas and papayas grow their flowers and fruits and join the rest of us happy fugitives, returned now to the primeval garden, living the good life. Running wild (or as wild as we wish at this late date...) Reminders are everywhere, that it just takes time and following your heart to begin living up to our birth right, our true potential. Memory doesn’t leave. It kind of just gets buried in the goo. But the Call of the Wild exists in us, waiting to say “Welcome Home”.

Florida Gardening seeds to plant for January and February

SEEDS FOR JANUARY AND FEBRUARY

Here are some seeds you might want to start during January and February: Beans, Beets, Brussels Sprouts, Cabbage, Cantaloupe, Carrot, Cauliflower, Collard, Corn, Cucumber, Eggplant, Endive, Kale, Kohlrabi, Leek, Lettuce, Mustard, Onion Seed, Onion Sets, Parsley, Parsnip, English Peas, Pepper, Potatoes, Radish, Romaine, Rutabaga, Spinach, Squash, Swiss Chard, Tomato, Turnip, and Watermelon.

Newspaper mulch.

Here is my newspaper mulch! As close as I'll get to Florida snow. The oldest part is about three months old now and the occasional weed does peak through. But I'm saving loads of time and back bending and it's much nicer to walk on barefoot than the pebbly, stick-y sand.