This plant hearkens back to prehistoric times as the only
cycad native to North America. The Coontie is a
nearly indestructible plant that you can put almost anywhere.
So Zamia integrifolia,
also known as the Coontie is a slow-growing evergreen pom like shrub that grows
about three to four feet tall and about three to five feet wide and tolerates
full sun to full shade. And also a variety of different well-draining soils
sometimes referred to as palms.
Coontie are actually cycads, meaning that they predate
flowering plants and they’re super cool because this is a plant that was around
when the dinosaurs were here. This is something a T-Rex could have stepped on.
Cycads are gymnosperms and we talked a little bit about that during our slash pine video. So if you
want, go ahead there to check it out. But basically, that means they reproduced
by male and female cones.
So when we get a little bit closer, we have the
opportunity to see the male and female cones together. So here we’ve got the
male cone, so it’s a little bit taller, a little bit slimmer, and this is what
houses all of the pollen. So you can see kind of the pollen sacks in there and
we can come over a little bit this way and see the female cone. Now the female
cone is much larger and this one’s mature and you can see that this houses the
orange-reddish fruit that’s inside of it.
So because the Coontie is such an adaptable plant, you can
use it for things like edging, a low growing shrub, understory plantings,
ground covering, and you can even grow it in a pot every few years. I do like
to cut the Coontie back and let it flush out with new growth.
However, this is not a plant that requires regular
maintenance. The Coontie is one of the easiest plants to grow, and it’s a
surefire way to add a little native Florida to your landscape.
Hey everyone, welcome back to the nursery. I wanted to do
a quick little video today because we hear a lot of things in the nursery, a
lot of questions we get asked, but there’s a couple of things that come up
quite a bit, a lot of misconceptions about native plants. So, uh, let’s talk
So the first misconception we need to talk about is native
plants don’t eat water. That’s not true. Uh, during this establishment period,
right? When you come in and you buy a plant, you need to give it just as much
water as it might be getting here in the nursery to make sure that it gets
established. Uh, these things get water every day. They get watered every
single day, and to make sure that these plants will adapt to the environment that
you’re trying to put them in, you know, into your landscape. You want to make
sure that they get just as much water as they would here until they acclimate,
right? So we usually give a period of a couple of weeks to a few months
depending on the size of the plant to ensure that it’s established, to make
sure that when it’s left to its own devices, it’s going to adapt and be, uh,
you know, as healthy as it wants to be.
The other thing that I hear a lot of is that people want
no maintenance plants. They want something that they can put into a landscape
and never really have to maintain. And there’s a lot of misconception around
our native plants that, you know, they’re one of them, their plants blanketly
that can be put into a landscape and not touched and still expected to perform.
You know, whichever way that the, that the homeowner might think. That’s
something that you really have to think about is understanding your plants, you
know, knowing how they’re going to perform in a landscape with or without that
maintenance. So the other thing that’s a little bit less of a misconception,
more of just a plus of creating a native plant garden is that you don’t have to
fertilize as much as, you know, using exotics. These are plants that have grown
and adapted to the conditions for years and years and years.
So when you put them in a garden that’s, you know, very
similar or is exactly what our Florida soil is, you know, you can cut out all
of that fertilizer use that we, um, that we implement on a lot of our exotic gardens.
The other thing is thinking about the kind of garden you’re trying to achieve.
If you’re looking for a while, Florida natural garden, then you’re looking for
something that you won’t have to maintain quite as much. You don’t want all
those neat shapes. You want things to be free-flowing flowers to be blooming
all over the place, but you want everything to be as it would in nature. So
naturally you’re not going to have as much maintenance to do, not a lot of
pruning, but if you’re looking for more of a maintain look with your Florida
native plants, you will have to put in a little bit more effort.
So I think the biggest takeaway from this is that you
definitely want to understand exactly what your plant wants to do, specifically
in a landscape setting. You want to understand how these plants grow, what they
need to establish and, and grow vigorously. You know, and that’s what we’re
here to do. We’re here to inform and educate and, um, you know, explain how
these plants work so that you can create a sustainable and functional native
garden. So, thank you guys again for watching another one of our videos. If you
liked it, go ahead and subscribe. Hit the like button, hit that bell. So the
next time we upload one of these, you guys know right away and we’ll see you
next time.
So today we’re going to talk about one of our most prolific fall-blooming wildflowers. This stuff is called Climbing Aster. It’s Symphyotrichum carolinianum. This one is a mounding wildflower, so it will either grow kind of on itself, kind of mound a little bit, or look for something to crawl on.
Here in this bog garden, we’ve got it planted right behind one of our big rock fountains there. So it’s got a little bit of structure to pull from. But as it’s planted in here, it wants a wet soil, wants a moist soil. So it does want sun to keep up this propensity of blooms, but it does want a moisture soil to really thrive.
So this is fantastic for all of your different native pollinators. We’ve got stuff like sweat bees and bumblebees and, and all the other ones that’ll come and pollinate these guys.
But you can just see the crazy amount of blooms that this thing produces. It’s absolutely breathtaking in the fall. It’s one of the best ones that we can have towards this part of the year when a lot of things are going dormant. So it’s definitely one of the ones that we like to promote now. It’s very easy to grow, granted you’ve got the right spot.
Even putting on like an arbor, you can get it to grow kind of over a canopy, a seating area, something like that, whatever you’ve got to support it, it does fantastic. Or if you’ve got an area that’s close to the water, kind of the edges of a pond or something, they’ll do fantastic there. So yeah, just giving you a little bit of insight. This is one that’ll help keep some color a unique shape towards the back end of the year.
So thank you guys again for watching one of our plant profiles. Be sure to hit that subscribe button, the like button, leave a comment down below.
Let us know any plants that you guys want us to talk about in the future. And we’ll see you guys next time.
Here is the debut of our YouTube channel! We have our first Native Plant Profile (below), as well as a short intro video about Wilcox Nursery. Go check it out and subscribe, so you don’t miss our new videos!
Florida Native Plant Profile: Blazing Star Transcript
Presented by: Davis Byrkit
Hey guys, welcome back to Wilcox Nursery. One of the things, when people come in, they get overwhelmed really quickly at the diversity of all the different native species that we have.
So one of the things we like to do is we like to take those out of the nursery and put those into a landscape setting.
So we will go and we’ll plant them all throughout the nursery landscape so that as you browse and you go and you look at these different plants, you can see what they all look like two, three, four years down the line. You know, all of our wildflowers are shrubs, trees, and palms, just so that you can get an idea of the characteristics and the personality of each plant. So today what we’re going to do is we’re going to take one of our most popular fall-blooming wildflowers and show you how you can incorporate it into your pollinator garden.
Here we’ve got Liatris tenufolia. It’s one of our many species of Blazing Star. But this one is a little bit more acclimated to a landscape scenario. It doesn’t get nearly as tall as some of the other species that can push, you know, six, seven feet. And it does have a little bit of a grassy head of foliage, so it’s a little bit more attractive as opposed to just a big spike.
It’s a beautiful fall bloomer towards the end of the year. It will give you some nice purple colors. You know, a backdrop to maybe Bahama cassia, some yellows, a couple of other plants when we have a lot blooming in the spring and the summer. It’s something that can add that pollinator interest, get some bees and butterflies into your yard towards the end of the year.
So here, taking a closer look we’ve got that grassy head of foliage like I said it won’t exceed maybe, you know, a foot a couple of inches, just depending on how established it is. And then once we go up here, we’ve got these beautiful spikes that’ll push three to four feet tall of those little tiny purple flowers.
And you can see a couple of bees buzzing around. I mean, they’re wonderful, wonderful nectar plants for these pollinators. So hopefully you guys liked the little plant intro we did.
We’re going to be doing a lot more of these in the future. Just trying to show you, a couple of the plants that we really like to promote here in the nursery.
And, hopefully, you guys subscribe, and, we’ll see you next time.
