A starter guide to cultivating plants that flourish in Florida Ideal for gardeners new to Florida and residents who want to try their hands at gardening for the first time, this starter guide helps readers learn to grow plants in the state’s unique natural environment. Botanist and lifelong gardener Ginny Stibolt shares helpful stories, advice, and tips from her own experience moving to Florida, where she discovered that the rules she had followed did not apply. Stibolt tells readers what they can do to avoid the beginner mistakes she made and dispels common misconceptions about which plants to grow and how to grow them in Florida. Introducing Florida’s water features, natural areas, and native plant communities, Stibolt shows what a “Real Florida” landscape looks like and explains how working with this knowledge makes gardening easier and more successful. She explores useful topics including gardening for birds and butterflies, growing food, composting, and stormwater management. Stibolt also points to resources for digging deeper into these and related subjects based on the reader’s needs and location within the state. Full of friendly, reliable, and commonsense expertise, Adventures of a Transplanted Gardener sets aspiring growers on the fast track to cultivating plants that flourish in Florida. This book is the perfect resource for anyone interested in the challenges, rewards, and beauty of gardening in the Sunshine State.

How to grow delicious produce in your own backyard In this guide, expert botanist Ginny Stibolt and Master Gardener Melissa Markham provide simple and accessible advice for successful vegetable gardening in Florida, where soil types vary and cool-weather crops are grown right through the mild winters. They offer advice on what to do with over-abundant harvests, strategies for developing a community garden, and suggestions for opportunities beyond the home garden. They also address integrated pest management, appropriate raised bed types, irrigation, seed saving, just-in-time harvesting, and food safety. This second edition is updated with the latest scientific knowledge and growing techniques; new crops for growers to try; more detail in the growing calendars separated by north, central, and south Florida regions; and color photos and illustrations throughout the text. Readers will appreciate this reliable resource that will help them and their families become more resilient by controlling some of their food from seed to table.

More and more Florida residents are deciding to replace highly fertilized, over-watered, pesticide-dependent lawns with native plants. They want to reduce their carbon footprints; save time, water, and money; and attract birds and butterflies. But where to begin? This illustrated guide will help you create new outdoor spaces that are both sustainable and beautiful. Taking the common ⅓-acre lot as an example, Ginny Stibolt and Marjorie Shropshire provide a sample layout for a basic native plant landscape. They use a grid system that allows gardeners to work on their yards in small sections instead of trying to revamp the entire landscape at once. The grid system can also be reduced or expanded for yards of varying size. By breaking down the process into individual steps, creating a Florida garden is achievable for beginners and experts alike. The first step is assessing your property and choosing which plants to keep and which to remove. Then, design your landscape to soak up more stormwater through the use of rain barrels, rain gardens, or ponds. The next steps involve planting trees, understory plants, and installing butterfly gardens. There are additional instructions for building wild areas into your landscape to provide habitat for birds and pollinators; creating a flexible outdoor room perfect for your family's needs today and into the future; and using plants to cool the air, provide screening for privacy, buffer incoming winds, and reduce noise. By following these methods, anyone can convert all or part of their yard into a more natural area without using pesticides or artificial fertilizers, which will save money, reduce pollution, and help support wildlife. Complete with detailed diagrams, a timeline for growth and maintenance, and lists of suggested plants for each step, this guide will help readers set up an environmentally friendly habitat and give them the time and peace of mind to enjoy it.

"Follow this professional gardening advice to end up with a balanced, attractive, easy-to-maintain Florida native garden. It is a gardening book to cherish."--Roger L. Hammer, author of Attracting Hummingbirds and Butterflies in Tropical Florida "Everything you need to know from just getting started to long-term development and maintenance of the native garden of your dreams."--Troy Springer, owner of Springer Environmental Services, Inc. "A great resource for learning some of the best approaches to gardening with natives."--Steven W. Woodmansee, CEO and biologist for Pro Native Consulting The standard dream home garden--the kind splashed across magazine covers--typically features emerald lawns and manicured flowerbeds. But most gardeners soon discover that those picture-perfect landscapes require hard work, persistent watering and fertilizing, and plenty of pesticides. As more homeowners free themselves from the shackles of regular lawn maintenance, they turn to native plants, which eventually start to look scruffy and scraggly. While there are plenty of guides for establishing a native landscape, there are few comprehensive resources for their maintenance. In this easy-to-read, practical, and honest approach to native plant landscaping, botanist and experienced gardener Ginny Stibolt shares techniques for living with a native landscape and personal lessons learned over the years. Dispelling the myth that native plants require no maintenance, she encourages readers with a simple upkeep schedule that is much more flexible than traditional suburban landscaping. She enumerates the many ecological rewards and covers the basics of gardening before delving into the removal of invasives and other unwanted plants, plant selection, planting methods, propagation, as well as the creation of manageable edges, meadows, groves, and wet sites. This is a must-read for novices and advanced gardeners alike. Stibolt's advice can be applied to small yards or large community properties. With just a little bit of effort and a reimagining of the ideal, gardeners can spend less time watering and weeding and more time enjoying their handiwork. And Mother Nature will thank them, too!

This book is an invaluable compilation of ecological information on 244 species of trees, shrubs, and woody vines found in the northern half of the Florida peninsula and in the Florida Panhandle. It covers the full range of native species in the region as well as common exotic plants, drawing on original experience and field research by ecologist Robert Simons. For each species, Simons describes the plant’s leaves, flowers, and fruit, geographical distribution, size, and lifespan. He also discusses its typical habitats, soil and light requirements, water needs and flooding tolerance, adaptation to fire, economic importance, and the plants, insects, and diseases most often associated with it. Notably, the book focuses on each plant’s relationship with wildlife, including which species eat the fruit or foliage or pollinate the flowers. It also features an introduction to the biological communities of northern Florida and a helpful glossary of botanical terms. The Ecology of the Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Northern Florida provides gardeners, landscapers, scientists, and students a foundational understanding of how these plants fit into the communities of organisms in which they live and how they have adapted to their place in their physical environment.

With the perspective of an American gardener living abroad, Elliott plumbs the far reaches of the British gardening psyche, musing on moles, on giant vegetables, and on taste in the garden. There are tales of great gardeners such as Edward Bowles and William Robinson, and of more dubious characters like William Forsyth, whose name adorns the shrub but who might better be remembered for a hoax. From the history of lawns and lawnmowers, to a technique for figuring out the age of your hedge, to the curious phenomenon of the "ha-ha" and the 18th-cent. landscape designer who recommended fake volcanoes, Elliott ranges wittily through the world of Brit. hort. past and present.