When Dr. Edwin Menninger bemoaned the “solid green” of Florida’s native flora, he must have forgotten about Salvia coccinea. If you want to add brilliant color to your home landscape, please consider this striking native shrub. Commonly known as Scarlet Sage, this herbaceous perennial from the family of lamiaceae is native to a huge range from South Carolina…
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If you’re not already familiar with Duranta erecta, now is a good time to get acquainted with this very attractive New World flowering species. Like a lot of plants, it comes with its own little bag of mysteries: Its current specific epithet, erecta, means upright. Yet an older epithet, repens, means creeping. That sounds like…
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No less a publication than Southern Living magazine has long recommended our native Firebush, Hamelia patens, to its readership. And it’s no wonder. The species has many endearing qualities. First, if not foremost, it’s rather cold-tolerant. The Florida Native Plant Society regards it as suitable for planting through Zone 9a, whose northern limit is along…
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The mere mention of the word Bougainvillea conjures up nasty thorns before beautiful flowers. Many people love the flowers, but not the headache of trying to prune this vine without getting torn up by its vicious thorns. Now there is a solution. The best of both worlds if you will. The Bougainvillea cultivar ‘Pixie’. It…
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Brazilian Red Cloak (Megaskepasma erythrochlamys) was included in a June 2015 article on this website about hedge material, but it merits special attention now that it is blooming spectacularly. This single-species genus is a New World native that occurs in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Venezuela, but not really Brazil. It is capable of…
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