My quest for Autumness continues. To me, Fall means fruit to harvest, red and orange foliage and the end of hurricane season. Not this week, South Floridians are collectively holding their breath as Hurricane Matthew spins into a nightmare in the Caribbean. There is nothing to do but wait at this point, so I decided to look for some autumnal color in the garden and was gifted with some produce from neighbors.
The vase began with the selection of the Turk’s Cap (Malvaviscus sp) in red, this shrub is naturalized in Florida and pops up in the garden flowering nearly year round – it had an especially nice burst of flowers this week, followed by something passing through that left the foliage in tatters -the flowers were put to good use and the shrub got a cosmetic procedure. Next I added some orange Firebush (Hamelia patens) flowers followed by red striped Dwarf Pineapple foliage and Dwarf Heliconia foliage, the mystery weed with frothy off white flowers completes the arrangement.
The fruits are from my neighbors. I confess to buying the pumpkin, I live too far south to grow pumpkins for fall. The long fruit is another Papaya from my neighbor, my husband weighed it and it weighs 5 pounds! My plan for this is Papaya Bread and Papaya Pineapple Granita, so I hope to freeze what we can’t eat. The Avocados are from a friend of another neighbor with a prolific tree. These are really good and I have been eating Avocado and everything sandwiches for the past couple of days.
As for Hurricane Matthew it looks like it will bypass us to the east – I am keeping my fingers crossed.
Amelia Grant
A native of Atlanta, Georgia and extraordinarily well seasoned Landscape Architect/Designer/Writer. I began bouncing around South Florida in the late 1980’s selecting and buying plants for Shopping Mall Interiors I had designed.
Eventually my college roommate landed in Hobe Sound and I came to visit and fell in love with the Treasure Coast. My husband was on the verge of retiring from the practice of Architecture so we came down, bought a house near the Indian River and left the big city’s cold and the traffic far behind.
The blog began as an effort to fill what I considered a vacuum in good gardening information for the Treasure Coast. The Shrub Queen name is a nod to a long standing joke, my husband has called me this for years after one too many Architects asked me to “shrub something up”.
