Greetings Growers and Lovers of Green Things
We got hit by Hurricane Ian
Welcome to Our Garden, finally. It’s taken a bit.
First things first, Hurricane Ian paid us a visit. Don’t freak out. Our family is safe. Our house, sheds, and pool cage have minimal damage. However, Our Garden was not so lucky. It along with most of our county was spectacularly devastated. It was all over the news. You can see the Before & After slideshow of Our Garden, or the Hurricane Ian photos.
If you are in our shoes, growing tropical after a big storm, take a deep breath. It’s okay if the biggest devastation you felt was all your beautiful green things turned into coleslaw, no matter what’s happened. You’re probably a grower like me. Time, effort, and love tend to do that to you. I’m sure our northern growing friends have been looking at all the ripped up trees in horror as well. I’m not going to lie, it’s been hard to look at everyday. It always is an extended bummer.
Have some hope growers. Prop them back up, clean them off, you can even cut them to the ground in some cases, most things will come back, surprisingly so. Even that bougainvillea growing too close to the house, you can’t make yourself kill, can be torn to ground numbs in two different storms, and it always comes back. Tropical growing is like that.
Each week we will be focusing on a different area of restoration. We have quite a few. Come back to see how we get everything growing or just to see the magic show in our weekly What’s Blooming slideshow. Because if tropical gardens are nothing else, they are spectacular, and I like to photograph ours.
We’re already seeing signs of new life, have been since the day after the storm. In fact, I have mature leaves on some plants stripped bare by the wind. The first week is always the hardest as dead stuff on the ground and blanketing everything turns brown. My mom and I joked it really looked like fall outside – flooded, but still – we lose our leaves here in the late winter/spring, if at all. Two falls this year, yea!
Resolve sets in after about a month when most of the cuts have been made and the new leaves on the living reach maturity. It’s when the extent of the damage is really understood. My advice is plant something new, day one or two after the storm. We like flowers for joy. It also gives me a focus when purposefully ignoring broken shriveling things. I cleaned-up a couple of the front flower pots first and did my fall vegetable planting. It’s helped me refocus on the new growth while dealing with the devastation. And Our Garden was devastated.
In Our Garden, we all have trees. Dawson’s tree, a white Hong Kong orchid tree, went down with the entire top half of my giant south american tree (not as labeled – type unknown) nestled spearingly over the top of it. It looked like the torn maze in Sleeping Beauty and took out the fence.
Did I mention on the day Dawson was born twenty years ago, my mom and I collected seed pods from the hospital that she nurtured into that tree? All the wood is amazingly stunning. I use it in my reclaimed wood art as it falls, but still. There was just so much of it. It fell onto my traditional vegetable and herb garden, the fountain, and bulb garden. The entire area is crushed and will need to be completely reworked. Dang.
We also lost half of the anniversary tree, a variegated purple Hong Kong orchid tree my mom’s husband bought for her on one of their 1st anniversaries. It’s gone down several times, but it always comes back.
5 of the 6 white bird of paradise trees toppled in the area we call the Cage Match. There is a 7’ x 20’ tunnel through the middle. It’s a complete mess. Since a ⅓ of the garden was flooded for over a week, the new berm trees – orchid, coconut palm, plantains, schefflera tree, all down and seemingly drowned. We have a scrub oak down over on the back fence that fell into my cabbage palm grove covering the palmetto bushes and so much more.
When the wind advisories in our area expired, we went outside for a quick assessment. It was a huge relief to see all the structures intact, but the trees, acting as windbreaks, doing their jobs, did not fair well. All the vegetation, a blended blanket of green covering the world like snow. In the immortal words of Bobby Singer: Balls. I spent a total of 3 minutes standing on the outside patio before I had to go inside. It was too much.
We started our restoration on day one after the storm. My family showed up to run chainsaws, chop vegetation and drag branches out to the curb. It’s taken up most of my free time since. I constantly look like I’ve lost a fight with a bobcat, but objectively Our Garden is starting to gain its tropical glow.
Like most things, tropical weather and growth runs in cycles. We literally just started a new cycle with Ian, a super hard cut. Things are going to die, and die back. Whole areas need to be replanned and reworked – replanted. Then, with some nurturing and probably a massive amount of work, things will once again run truly tropical.
Sadly, the blog/website has been in the works for months with all kinds of fun stuff planned. Ian kind of poured all those into a big ole jar and shook it real hard. After some discussion, we realized it was actually the perfect place to start. Without all the pomp of the amazing tropical garden in full flourish, we’re going to start with: things look bad, now what. Because that’s growing.
Whether you’re a northern grower needing some winter green, ideas before spring or a tropical counterpart trying to figure it out, please come back and visit us each week as I highlight a new area of restoration and see the What’s Bloomn’ slideshow. I enjoy taking photos of nature, and I will probably blow my size limit on my site – often. I hope you enjoy.
May all your green things flourish!
