By The Plant Lady
I love orchid shows. I've been to four already this season.
But I am beginning to find them a little frustrating.
In recent years, many vendors have started putting their most glorious blooms on display as "not for sale, samples only." Okay, this is fine, sometimes these are larger plants with multiple flowers, and they want to show them off during the whole two or three-day show as the best this particular kind of orchid has to offer.
But instead of offering single or less dramatic blooms for sale, the ones you can actually buy usually have no blooms at all, perhaps a bud or two, but not always. Sometimes they are small, immature orchid plants that could take several years to produce flowers. I have several like this: they look healthy, they are growing steadily, but not yet ready to bloom after more than two years.
The sad part is that these boring non-blooming orchid plants--let's face it, the foliage on most orchids is just plain ugly-- are not especially cheap. I just don't get the same thrill out of buying a homely green plant as I do out of buying a flower or at least a few buds, especially when I am paying $20 or $30. I want to know that the orchid I am buying is going to bloom at least once!
The really small plants are usually a bargain--if you have the patience to wait them out, or maybe a shade house to baby them along. I find myself taking pictures of the lovely "sample" so that I can remember what I bought during the years it takes to coax a bloom out of them.
I much prefer instant gratification.
\ I always buy at the booths that have bloomers for sale, or at least plants with a few buds, and there still are some. But just recently I noticed that when some varieties of orchids have a nice spike or two, the prices are jumping up into the $45 range and beyond.
It also seems there are certain "in" species or colors that pop up all over a show. I have more than 50 orchids, and sometimes I have a hard time finding something that is not the same or close to what I already have.
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| Den. Roy Tokunaga |
This year the trendy orchid at a recent show seemed to be Den. Roy Tokunaga. It was everywhere. At another show, nearly every booth seemed to have Beallara Marfitch "Howard's Dream." Always I see my yellow and red LC Gold Digger, or something similar enough that I don't want to buy it. And the speckled Kaleidoscope Phalaenopsis: everywhere, for years. You can even find this one at Home Depot.
I get it, selling orchids at a show where booth space is costly is a business, and if a variety is popular, you go with it. But it isn't like there aren't hundreds of varieties of orchids out there, and I can guarantee, virtually all of them are appealing to orchid lovers. I have a book with pictures of 1,500 different orchids.
Surely the vendors could give us a break from the blush- colored Phals, the deep burgundy Dendrobiums and the Oncidiums that smell like chocolate.
By The Plant Lady
I spent a lot of years gardening in the Midwest. It in no way prepared me for dealing with a little more than an acre in South Florida. The biggest difference is that nothing shuts down in Florida. There may be a slow season when things don't grow as much, but there is no true dormancy like you have when a couple of inches of snow covers everything.
For example, it is mid-February now, and it has been a rather cool, wet, atypical winter here. Yet I have new leaves sprouting on my pomegranate tree, Knockout roses and orchids all over the yard, and my bromeliads, begonias, firecracker plant and pentas are all in full bloom. Hundreds of beautiful white and burgundy flowers covered my spectacular 35-ft tall Clerodendrum Quadriloculare tree (also known as a starburst) from top to bottom for most of January and February.
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| Starburst Clerodendrum |
True, many trees have thinned out and lost some leaves, but only a few, like my crepe myrtles, are totally bare. The landscape may not be lush right now, but it is a far cry from the starkness of the Midwest at this time of year.My yard is, for the most part, still green.
Newcomers to the subtropics may think that makes gardening so much easier. After all, everything grows in South Florida, all year round, right? What could be more fun than that? But that is precisely why gardening here is a much bigger challenge than those from low-numbered USDA zones could ever imagine. Insects don't die, weeds keep growing, and nothing ever truly "dies back."
I think the biggest mistake I made as a new southern gardener was spacing my plantings. Or rather, not spacing my plantings.I had no concept of how much and how fast things would grow. I bought the towering tree at the left in a 3-gallon pot about 8 or 10 years ago and pruned it vigorously until I could no longer reach high enough.
Almost everything I ever planted here is crashing into something else. The beautiful flowering trees I planted in my front yard rarely flower, because they are shaded by the two giant Live Oaks in the center of the yard that I figured would never get much bigger than they already were--at least while I still lived here. Wrong.
My Firebush, which is about a million times bigger than I ever envisioned it, has completely overgrown the Firespike next to it, and is encroaching on a couple Crotons as well.
So remember, no matter how barren it looks when you first lay out your plantings according to spacing recommendations, it won't be a problem for long. And do a little research online, adding the word Florida to your search, because the growing tips on most plant labels do not accommodate Florida conditions.
So here are just a few beginners' tips for starting your Florida landscape.
1. Don't try to reproduce the things you loved "back home." They won't be happy here. Just because Home Depot and Lowes sell roses and hydrangeas and lilies doesn't mean you should plant them. Go for a mix of native and tropical plants. The natives, because Mother Nature designed them to grow here, and the tropicals because they can stand most of the weather conditions here, or at least all but the most severe cold snaps, and will add the flash and bang that natives sometimes lack.
2. Beware of invasives. Once they are given a toe-hold, you will spend half your gardening hours trying to uproot them. Remember, there is no frost to kill them off. Though pretty, those cheerful purple Ruella can be a nightmare. And just because the label says they are sterile, don't fall for it: They spread by underground runners. Mother-in-law tongues, benign houseplants in the north, can take over a garden, as can those favorites of northern hanging baskets, asparagus ferns.
Even natives can have bad habits: I once planted four small native dune or beach sunflowers, pretty little yellow-daisy like flowers with bright green leaves. Big mistake. By the time I realized they were getting out of control, I was able to fill six large garbage cans and a few black bags with what I pulled out.
Check the Florida Exotic Pest Plant Council (fleppc.org) or FLIP (Florida Invasive Plant), a field guide created by the University of South Florida, among other groups, at plantatlas.usf.edu.
I have to admit that although it does not make any of the official lists, the clerodendrum family of gorgeous bushes, like the one above, and the beautiful orange pagoda bush, can be troublesome. They spread by underground runners, and I have found sprouts coming up dozens of yards away from the original plant, in the middle of hedges and even in the neighbors' yard. If left untended they grow into bushes rapidly. I am careful to weed them out, and the lawnmower takes care of most of them. Although I love the flowers, I can't recommend these bushes/trees without a warning.
3. Think twice before you plant vines. There are many gorgeous tropical vines,and a lot of people probably disagree with me about this, but my experience is that they are difficult to control. I once had a passion vine bend my fence, jump to a tree and cover the top of it. I didn't realize it until one day I saw passion flowers dangling down among the leaves of a Barbados cherry tree.
4. Your biggest job will be pruning, and it is best not to let it get away from you: things grow faster here than you ever imagined. Your favorite tools will be a lopper, a machete, and one of those long pole saws.
So good luck, and welcome to South Florida, where orchids grow on your patio, tomatoes bear fruit in the winter and gardening is a lot of work.
