Tag: native plants

Winter Wrap-Up

Winter Wrap-Up

Since spring officially starts on Thursday, I thought now might be a good time to take a look back and assess what I’ve been able to accomplish this winter around Spruce Pine Cottage. Well . . . I made a new feltie ornament for my 

Preparing the Yard for Spring

Preparing the Yard for Spring

Last weekend I helped my yard wake up from its long winter’s nap. I swept thick layers of leaves off the paths, did hours of pruning, pulled up loads of winter weeds, and planted pink and white dianthus around my three stone birdbaths near the 

Our Latest Garden Bed

Our Latest Garden Bed

A lush garden bed with a brick border

In October 2017 Rob and I started developing our latest garden bed⁠—a large curving area under the giant pecan tree in the backyard. For years this new bed looked rather awkward and scrawny, with lots of bare spots and weedy spots, but recently it’s had a glow up. The summer rains have made it so lush that I think I can finally share some pictures without getting too embarrassed.

The first step I took when creating the bed was to build a little stone patio to serve as the centerpiece. Usually my homemade patios are extremely bumpy and slanty, but this one actually looks pretty good. I’m not quite sure why. I think it may be due to the nice flat large stones I was able to procure at Native Nurseries (my favorite nursery in Tallahassee).

Once the patio was in place, Rob and I used garden hoses to help us come up with the shape of the surrounding bed. We traced the outline with blue marking chalk, then went over it with our edger so it would be a little more permanent. We put down heavy-duty brown paper from the hardware store to kill the grass and weeds, and then we covered the paper with pine bark mulch, which we bought by the bag at Roses. When leaves fell on the bed in fall, we let them lie. We even supplemented them with loads of extra leaves that we found on our neighbors’ trash piles.

Because the bed is rather big, mulching it took a while. But filling it with plants took longer; it took years. I like my shade beds to look really natural, like little forests, with an herb layer, a shrub layer, an understory layer, and a canopy layer. In this particular bed, the herb layer is made up of lady ferns, southern wood ferns, Christmas ferns, chain ferns, yellowroot, golden ragwort, and wild violets. The shrub layer consists of coonties, mapleleaf viburnum, camellias, needle palms, hearts-a-bustin’, and wild azaleas. In the understory you’ll find red buckeyes, an Ashe magnolia, and two young cedars, while the canopy is formed by the grand old pecan tree, a beech tree, and a southern magnolia.

In March of this year, I added a tidy edge around the whole bed using bricks arranged in a sawtooth pattern. The brick edging gave the bed a more finished look, and I started feeling pretty pleased with it.

“The new bed isn’t looking so bad anymore,” I said to Rob one day in April.

The animals that live in our yard seem to like it too. I often see box turtles sheltering under the fern fronds, and white squirrels (we have a population of white squirrels in Quincy) scurrying up the trunk of the pecan tree.

Even though I say I’m satisfied with the bed now, I know I’ll keep adding plants and decorations. And the plants will get bigger and more beautiful every year. One of the great things about a garden is that it just keeps getting better over time. It becomes lusher and more detailed; it grows in character. To see it changing and improving is a wonderful reason to get up every morning.


A stone patio surrounded by ferns and other plants

A lush garden bed with a brick border

A hand-drawn border of trumpet flowers

Pokeweed Is a Good Weed

Pokeweed Is a Good Weed

I always try to leave some space in my yard for pokeweeds that pop up, from seeds sown by the birds. This year I have one by the picnic table, one by the arch that leads into the vegetable garden, and one by the bird 

Purple Coneflower Explosion

Purple Coneflower Explosion

Each May a great transformation takes place in our borders and meadow garden when the purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) start to bloom. The beds turn rosy pink and buzz and flutter with bees and butterflies. And I wear myself out taking pictures and picking bouquets 

An American Classic: American Holly

An American Classic: American Holly

One of my favorite trees in our yard is the American holly (Ilex opaca). There’s a big one, maybe 50 feet tall, growing near the pond, just outside the picket fence. Right now it’s dropping its yellow leaves, replacing them with fresh green ones. I always wanted to have an American holly in my yard, and now, finally, I do.

I remember my first encounter with this native species. I got to know it in the ‘80s when my parents bought a little piece of an old quail-hunting plantation north of Tallahassee. Small hollies grew among the live oaks on our acre, and I was immediately enamored of them. I liked their pale, smooth, lichen-spotted bark, and their rounded leaves, which were so much less prickly—so much gentler—than the exotic hollies that grew around the foundation of our house (and that my father regularly clipped into balls and domes). I just thought the little trees were so classic and classy, and when my father told me they were American hollies, I felt very proud (I was a rather patriotic kid).

It probably goes without saying that along with the bark and the leaves, I also liked the fruits of these little hollies. I’d never seen real holly berries before; I’d only seen pictures and drawings, and plastic representations that my mom used to decorate her Christmas wreaths. (The exotic hollies my father shaped into balls didn’t generally fruit.) Real holly berries–I couldn’t get over it!

When I bought my first house, in Atlanta, I wanted to plant an American holly in the backyard, but I couldn’t find one at any of the nurseries, though I looked and looked. Then Rob and I moved to Quincy, and we were so happy when we discovered we had that beautiful holly by the pond fence, and that the big holly had given us dozens of “babies,” sprinkled all about the yard.

Shortly after we moved in, a former owner of our house, Mr. Stinson, came to visit (he had not been back to the house in a long time), and he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the big holly tree. Apparently he had planted it as a seedling more than 25 years before. I could tell by his expression that he was quietly rejoicing as he looked up at the tree. “It’s joined the canopy!” he said after a minute, clearly thrilled. And I understood his happiness. It’s a great thing to see something you did, an effort you made, come to fruition, pay off, make the world a little bit better. The tiny twig of a holly he had planted so long ago had become a tree, a grand tree—shading us, cleaning the air, providing food and shelter for birds. It had lived, triumphed.

Rob and I are very grateful to Mr. Stinson for planting the holly. And I think the birds and other animals that visit our yard appreciate it too. American holly is a great wildlife tree.

The berries are an important food for birds, food that helps them get through the lean times at the end of winter. Apparently the fruits are bitter, not delicious (they’re actually poisonous to humans), and birds won’t generally eat them until late in the season, when they’ve been made more palatable (milder) by repeated freezing and thawing. (Or at least that’s what I’ve read.) Here are a few of the birds that use the fruits: mockingbirds, robins, catbirds, bluebirds, brown thrashers, and blue jays. Raccoons will eat them too, I’ve heard.

American holly is a good tree to plant if you want to support pollinators. The tiny white spring flowers are visited by bees, moths, and butterflies in their search for nectar, and the Henry’s elfin, a small brown hairstreak, lays its eggs on the leaves. (Dahoon and yaupon hollies also serve as host plants for the Henry’s elfin.)

American holly is native from Massachusetts to Florida, west to Texas and Missouri. It’s slow growing and long-lived. Plant it in partial shade in moist, well-drained, acidic soil. Water it during dry spells until it’s established. Then just enjoy it. There’s no maintenance involved. Mature trees reach heights of about 20 to 60 feet.

You’d think with all the hollies I have now (the big one and all its offspring) that I’d have my house decorated to the nines at Christmas. But no. Not so. I can never bring myself to cut even a single leaf or branch, though I love the idea of natural decorations. I guess when it comes right down to it, I’d rather see the branches on the trees than on my mantelpieces.

Rob standing by the holly showing off some carrots
Holy Smokes, It’s Pipevine!

Holy Smokes, It’s Pipevine!

Native pipevine (Aristolochia tomentosa) is a favorite plant of mine. So far, I’ve planted it in two locations in my yard—on the tin-roofed shelter that I call the Vine House, and on the little wire fence that encloses our vegetable garden. It looks so pretty 

Pumpkin Muffins and a Camellia Show

Pumpkin Muffins and a Camellia Show

On Saturday I was so happy just because I was free. For one precious day I didn’t have to go to work and I could do whatever I wanted. I added a sweetshrub (Calycanthus floridus) and three Elliott’s blueberries (Vaccinium elliottii) to our big bed around the pond, and Rob limbed up a lot of trees so …

Mom’s Christmas Pecan Balls

Mom’s Christmas Pecan Balls


I really can’t resist posing shiny peppers for photos.

I’d like to take time out from my England-trip posts to say how happy I was to be home this weekend. I got to do all my favorite things: play with the cats, garden, and bake cookies!
Yesterday we were outside the whole day, planting plants in our pond garden–a thing I’d been dreaming about doing for months. We planted three Florida anises, three piedmont azaleas, an ashe magnolia, five coonties, two beautyberries, and a southern arrow-wood (all natives). The yard was so warm and golden, and there were cats about. I kept teasing Greg about how handsome he is, calling him Handsome Dan and saying, “Oh Greg, with your gorgeous long legs and your gorgeous yellow eyes. You are such a fine specimen!” He was mortified. He’s a very shy cat. Whenever he wants me to pet him, he has to turn his face away–he has to turn backwards–because being petted is just too embarrassing.
I really relished being outside, at home, sheltered by live oaks and pecans and surrounded by cats. I planted three more Shi-Shi Gashira sasanquas under our big banana shrub (Michelia figo), next to the stone path we reset a few months ago. Then I mulched the whole bed with leaves stolen off our neighbors’ trash piles. I am the biggest trash picker, and lately I’ve gotten Rob into it too.
“How can people throw away leaves?” he’ll say, getting all up in arms. “They might as well be throwing out bags of gold!”
Or at least bags of fertilizer.
Spreading mulch sure beats being stuck on an airplane over the Atlantic. But then I’m a fan of just about any domestic chore. Even fixing our usual enormous, pain-in-the-ass Sunday lunch was fun today because I got to make cranberry sauce, the berries popping merrily, making a mess all over the stove. I like to eat cranberry sauce piping hot, but I’ve never met anybody else who does.
Rob made vegan sweet potato casserole with our own homegrown sweet potatoes. It took him forever to get through all the steps. And meanwhile, I was adding hot peppers to everything because we picked three and a half pounds of them yesterday and I didn’t want a single one to go to waste. We had kale and hot peppers, and collards and hot peppers, and tofu scramble with hot peppers. . . . The fumes from the sizzling habaneros had us coughing and wheezing and running for Kleenex.
“I wonder if these hot-pepper fumes will do any longterm damage,” Rob said hoarsely, and then he went into another coughing fit.
As we coughed and cooked (such a sanitary combination!), the cats were underfoot, keeping us company. (Wouldn’t you like to come to dinner?) Elroy was rolling an apple around on the floor. I had some soy sausage thawing in a pan of warm water. I was busy cutting up some more peppers when Rob reported, “Carl of course is drinking the water out of the sausage defroster.”
“Of course,” I said. Carl loves to drink water out of interesting receptacles. We often catch him licking dirty sponges.
I made some of Mom’s famous Christmas pecan balls this afternoon. They turned out perfect! Pecan balls were always my favorite of Mom’s many Christmas creations. When I was a kid, “Christmas baking” was such a big, beloved ritual for our family. We were pretty poor back then and Dad wouldn’t let Mom spend money on sweets (or anything really), so she’d sneak the ingredients home and hide them (for weeks) in anticipation of the big day when he’d be gone somewhere and we’d all come out of our hiding places and bake for hours. Every year we made cut-out cookies and date balls and pecan balls and sausage balls and icebox fruitcake and toffee and fudge and seven-layer bars and Chex party mix and gingerbread boys. One year we even made “stained glass” cookies with melted Life Savers in their centers. And all the while we were baking, Kris and I would be laughing and joking and driving Mom crazy with our amateur comedy. (We always got overexcited.)
“Now I am going to run away!” Mom might cry at the end of the day.
Christmas was such a special time for us kids. Our ugly house would be temporarily beautified by the sparkling Christmas tree, and the usually bare pantry would be full of secret stashes of cookies. I adored the entire month of December. My brother and sisters and I went to a Catholic school, and we’d spend the weeks of Advent preparing ourselves spiritually for Christmas the way students at other schools might prepare themselves mentally for final exams. I guess that would never fly now–“wasting time” on the spirit to such a degree. Childhood is much more fast-paced and competitive these days.
A pecan ball. That’s my fabulous 1920s punchbowl glittering in the background.
Mom’s Christmas Pecan Balls
Ingredients:

1 cup vegan “butter,” softened

1/2 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup finely chopped pecans (use the blender)

Powdered sugar

Directions:

In a large mixing bowl, cream butter, sugar, and vanilla until light and fluffy. Sift in flour. Stir in pecans. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and chill for about an hour. Shape the dough into small balls. Place 1 inch apart on parchment paper-lined baking sheets. Bake at 325 degrees F for 20 minutes or until the bottoms are lightly browned. Roll in powdered sugar right after you take them out of the oven.