Weekly Garden Tip

July 30, 2006

By Gene Joyner, Extension Agent
Palm Beach County Cooperative Extension Service

If you’re a native born resident like I am you’ve probably in the last ten years been amazed at the loss of natural wooded areas in the county due to rapid development. Areas that I can remember as a young man walking through woods and never seeing civilization or hearing the noise of cars or other activities now are hard to find.

If you go to many large developments you see landscaping which is attractive, but in many cases much of it looks alike and doesn’t do a whole lot so far as providing habitat for our vanishing wildlife.

If you’d like to help do your part to attract wildlife back to your landscape and give a more natural look, try increasing the number of native plants in your neighborhood, especially shrubs and small trees that provide fruits, seeds, or berries for wildlife would really help increase the population of birds and other animals.

Many of our migratory birds in the fall and winter season now are having great difficulty in finding sufficient food sources because the areas that they went to last year this year when they come back through are now in housing. The woods and natural cover is long gone.

Fortunately there are many types of native plants available at local nurseries and many of these have interesting foliage, flowers or other attributes that make people want to use them in the landscaping. It doesn’t mean you have to get rid of all your exotics, like everyone else I have a mixture of both and I do enjoy a lot of tropical fruits most of which are exotics and non-native.

If you’d like to see examples of native plants, you can visit many of the county and city park and natural areas where they have preserved remnants of what Florida used to look like. This way you can see how things co-exist in the wild and the animals can make use of the habitat.
If you like to draw butterflies to the landscape, many of our native plants are great attractors of butterflies and for birds that like seeds and berries there are many native plants that provide those as well.

The Mounts Botanical Garden at 531 North Military Trail in West Palm Beach also has native plants in their collection so you can visit the garden anytime and take a look at some of these native plants that are available for landscape usage.

If you want to get a lot of detailed information on native plants, attend one of the monthly meetings of the Native Plant Society. The Native Plant Society of Palm Beach County meets the third Tuesday of each month at 7:30 p.m. at the Mounts Building Auditorium at 531 North Military Trail in West Palm Beach half way between Belvedere and Southern Boulevard.

Their meetings feature interesting speakers and often the club has regular field trips through the wild to go through natural areas and see plants that you normally would not see in an urban setting.

The Palm Beach County Extension office also has printed information which is free on native plants and you can get that at their offices during normal business hours. For advice about native plants over the telephone call the Extension Service at 233-1750 in the north and central county area or 276-1260 in the south county area.