Free plant list for September

Open Greenhouse & Plant Swap, Saturday, Sept. 6, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., 602 Ronele Drive, Brandon, FL 33511I

If you’ve never been to Open Greenhouse, it’s a great way to see what’s happening in my Florida-friendly yarden and meet other gardeners. The plant swaps are great fun – you never know who is going to bring what. (They’re not a tit-for-tat swap so you don’t need to bring anything if you don’t have plants you can share.)

UPDATED TO ADD: My sister is here with a load of fresh plumeria cuttings, marked by color this time. And my friend Mike will be here with a nice selection of Indian plants and vegetables that we don’t carry, including tindora, many kinds of beans, moringa, mango, sapodillia, hummingbirds, jashmeen, cherry and more for sale.

I’ll take a different tack for this month’s blog to focus on native bees instead of just plants. Even though honey bees get most of the attention when people talk about declining populations, native bees are threatened too. They don’t live in hives that beekeepers ake care for, so it’s up to gardeners to create and maintain the habitat they need. My Facebook friend Laura Zurro wrote an article for Bay Soundings in 2021 that inspired me to rethink how I garden, and my native bee population – particularly bumble bees – has grown exponentially since then. I have so many bumble bees now that I don’t even get excited about them anymore.

Laura wrote another article this month on how to keep native bees happy over the winter. I’m sorry to say I don’t have as many of these plants as I’d like (or as I’ll have this time next year!) but I have lots and lots of native Porterweed and elderberry. It took a couple of years for them to naturalize well, but now they’re popping up in places where I don’t need them. They’re super-easy to transplant and do well in sun or shade, even though the literature says full sun.

And while it’s not on her most recent list, I think one of the reasons my native bee population has been doing so well is firebush. It not only attracts native bees, but the larger plants block so much sun that the ground underneath them is bare – which is exactly what bumble bees and other native bees need to nest. Laura’s Facebook page is Florida Native Bees – I highly recommend that you follow it too.

Some of the other native plants we’ll be giving away this month include:

Native Red Salvia isanother plant on Laura’s that keeps blooming through hot dry summers. It spreads easily by seed and is a favorite of bees and many butterflies.

Scorpiontail is a charming native groundcover with tiny flowers that are perfect for tiny bees and moths, which are often neglected when people are planting pollinator gardens.

Wild coffee is another Florida native that is spectacular in a shalocation.

Simpson stopper seems to be happy in either sun or shade.

Beautyberry is a kind of boring little bush until fall, when it bursts out with beautiful purple fruit. Some people make jelly with them; I usually leave them for the birds and squirrels to gorge on.

Dune sunflower is a native groundcover that laughs at dry heat and keeps on blooming. We have some seeds and lots of cuttings that are easy to root — ask for directions if you’re never done it before. (I bought five plants last spring and they’ve pretty much covered a 10 by 25 spot that gets full sun and isn’t easy to water.)

While we grow lots of natives, I’m not 100% committed to natives if I see wildlife value in Florida-friendly plants that don’t require lots of water and aren’t likely to escape into natural areas and harm ecosystems. At the top of the list this month are my sister’s spectacular plumeria. She’s in Stuart and has been growing them so long that she needs to trim them often – and then brings us the cuttings to share.

We also grow a lot of non-native plants specifically because they attract hummingbirds, which are winter visitors in our region. Lots of the natives are slowing down, but non-natives like salmon Porterweed, candlestick senna, pagoda plant, flowering maple, Crinium lily, Dombeya and purple salvia will bloom all winter long unless temperatures drop below freezing.(Many of the original pieces of these plants came from Steve Backes, who runs the Facebook page Hummingbirds of Florida.)

And, of course, we’ll have lots of neem and Ayurvedic herbs to sell, including some spectacular betel, tulsi, ashwagandha and rooted cuttings of Rangoon creeper.