North Carolina Woods, Florida Style

Have to be honest here. Despite loving the 365-days a year gardening and the sunny winters, I'm not a tropical girl at heart.  I love my native North Carolina and Scotland roots. And hiking through the woods and mountains, whether it's North Carolina, Scotland, or Florida, is my ultimate pleasure.  There's something about foggy mornings, refreshing rain, and the fragrance of forest decay that re-energizes me.

Hiking along Rufus Morgan Trailhead, Franklin, NC.

So, in my backyard I have a pseudo-forest growing. I have substituted subtropical ornamental plants, shrubs, and trees, that give the ambiance of walking a Smokies’ mountaintop.  The landscape grows without me (because I don’t have time) and when I get a chance to walk outside, I love seeing the surprise of flowers and greenery especially after a few days of rain or even during a misty sprinkling. 

I almost missed my surprise this week though.  Blooming through the thickness of Florida native pipestem, Agarista populifolia, loropetalum, and candelabra flowers of Whitefeldia elongata,  the mountain sprite flowers of toad lilies, Tricyrtis ‘Dark Beauty’ have been blooming for awhile and I didn’t notice them for the thickness of the shrubs.

White Candles, Whitefeldia elongata, Toad lilies, Tricyrtis,and Pipestem, Agarista populifolia

Love them! Just made my day.  Toad lilies will grow in Zones 5 – 9.  They will do well in shade, rich, moist soils, and don’t mind being ignored. They aren't inexpensive but they do multiply easily.

 

 

You can get the White Candles at your local nurseries and my favorite catalog and North Carolina nursery, Plant Delights in Raleigh, has a wonderful selection of tricyrtis for your backyard. They even have them on sale right now.  You'll love these forest beauties.  Delight in your candles and tiptoe through the toad lilies with me.  

Can Genetically Altered Plants Prevent Global Warming?

Could forests of genetically altered plants help sequester billions of carbon from the atmosphere annually and stave off global warming? That's the focus of research by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists.

Besides increasing the efficiency of plants' absorption of light, researchers might be able to genetically alter plants so they send more carbon into their roots--where some may be converted into soil carbon and remain out of circulation for centuries. Other possibilities include altering plants so that they can better withstand the stresses of growing on marginal land, and so that they yield improved bioenergy and food crops. Such innovations might, in combination, boost substantially the amount of carbon that vegetation naturally extracts from air, according to the authors' estimates.

Read more here.

Free Guide To Identifying Southern Invasive Plants

The USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station has created a free pdf download of invasive plant species, “A Field Guide for the Identification of Invasive Plants in Southern Forests.”

The book is a more comprehensive identification guide to nonnative trees, shrubs, vines, grasses, ferns and forbs invading the region’s forests and other natural areas. The revised guide includes 23 more plant species with updated information on the original 33 species; 241 new photos and images and a new “Resembles” section so users can identify plant “look-alikes.”

The book’s appendix contains the most complete list of nonnative invasive plants in the 13 Southern states, providing common and scientific names for 310 other invading species including, for the first time, aquatic plant invaders.

Complete with color high density photographs, it takes a few minutes to download or you can email:

To: pubrequest@fs.fed.us
Subject: Publication Request
In email, type: Please send me: A field guide for the identification of invasive plants in southern forests (GTR-SRS-119) by Miller, James H.; Chambliss, Erwin B.; Loewenstein, Nancy J.

This publication should be in every Master Gardener Clinic, County Extension office, Master Naturalist, eco-tourism guide, and environmentalist's library. The pdf is an updated version of their original publication from 2003.