Throwback Thursday: Florida 2005

Strangler fig, Naples, January 2005

It's hard to believe I've been vacationing in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida for 10 years.  In 2005, Dan and I decided to spend a day there before traveling to Sarasota, where I was scheduled to give a talk at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.  I hadn't been to Florida since I was a kid, and never to south Florida at all, so I arranged a whirlwind tour that started in Ft. Lauderdale, stopping in South Beach on our way to a tour of Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden in Miami, driving across the state to visit my parents and aunt in Naples, up to Sarasota and Selby, then back to Naples for more family time and finally flying out of Ft. Myers, all in the space of 5 days.  In retrospect it was insane, but we enjoyed that trip immensely.  Here are a few more photos from that trip (although oddly enough, I have none from Ft. Lauderdale!).

Throwback Thursday: January 2014

Sunset, January 2014

This is how I'd like to remember January a year ago: a month of breathtaking winter sunsets.  Instead, it was a month of breathtaking cold: a disaster for my garden, and for anybody growing hardy palms or any other marginally hardy plants.  Meteorologists had been making dire forecasts for several days, prompting me to ask in early January "Is this the apocalypse?"  I wrote then, "The weather forecasters are starting to talk in apocalyptic terms, telling us that this event is likely to give us our lowest temperatures in 20 or maybe even 30 years."  Two days later, when I posted "It was @!#$% cold last night!", we had recorded DC's coldest temperatures since 1994.


Trachycarpus wagnerianus at 5° F (-15° C), January 7, 2014

The low that morning in my own back yard was about 5° F (-15° C).  My Trachycarpus wagnerianus, which I had grown from seed in 2001 and had been in the ground since 2003, was the first casualty.  The damage was immediate and irreversible, with the leaves appearing freeze-dried and never recovering.  My other two windmill palms looked almost as bad, but when the weather went above freezing again, they sprang back and showed little damage.   I think they would have made it, and maybe the waggie too, if we hadn't gotten several more visits from the "polar vortex" later that month.  Although the subsequent lows were several degrees warmer, some of them were more extended and the cumulative damage proved too much for two of my palms.  I wasn't surprised to lose my waggie but my T. fortunei "Nainital" was a more surprising casualty.  Even the sole surviving windmill palm, T. fortunei "Bulgarian", lost all its foliage--even the ones with a bit of green left in them ended up dying completely--but began to push out new leaves come April, and in May it even bloomed.


Trachycarpus fortunei "Bulgarian", March 2014

Since then it has recovered a bit, but not nearly as much as I'd like going into another cold winter.  Normally, I wouldn't be worried about windmill palms until lows drop below 10° (-12° C) but in its weakened state, I fear that it won't take temperatures nearly as cold as last winter's to kill it.  But I'm as determined as I was last year to forgo any protection, to see just how hardy this plant really is. 


Trachycarpus fortunei "Bulgarian", early January 2015

Last winter killed about half of the windmill palms in the Washington, DC area.   2015 got off to a mild enough start, with a high of 65° (18° C) just 3 days ago.  I was hoping this hinted at a warm winter but no such luck.  A year later, almost to the day, we're having a near-rerun of January 2014: the low temperature last night was 12° (-11° C).  That was at the upper range of the range that was forecast, so not as bad as it could have been, but I'm just not ready for temperatures like that again.  What will the rest of this winter bring?  I don't even want to think about it; better to dream about the warm weather, just a few weeks away.


Edgeworthia chrysantha, dreaming of spring

I'll end as I began, with a January sunset, this one from just a few days ago.


Sunset, January 2015

Throwback Thursday: Halloween 2003

Halloween, 2003

Not much to say today, just going through some old photos, looking for inspiration for carving this year's jack-o-lanterns and came across these guys I did in 2003.  Below is a jack-o-lantern I carved in an uncharacteristically patriotic mood for Halloween 2001, a rather somber time when nobody felt like celebrating and we only got 3 or 4 trick-or-treaters all night.

Happy Halloween!


Halloween, 2001

Throwback Thursday: Ithaca, 1987

Who on earth are these kids?  That's me on the left playing the piano, my partner (now husband) Dan standing on the right, and our friend Andrew between us.  Even knowing full well who these people are, I still have to ask: who are these kids?  27 years ago, 3 years out of college, we finally had our first house--okay, rented--but with its own yard and off-street parking, the first place where we stayed for more than one year, the first yard I mowed since graduating from high school, and the first time we had an unfurnished rental so we hit a lot of garage sales during that first year.  Even though we both had full-time jobs by this point, new furniture was a foreign concept because we were paying off student loans and had virtually no money.  Yet when I spotted this old piano at a sale one Sunday, I had to have it; we borrowed a friend's pickup truck, enlisted a couple of other friends, and went back to get it.  $700 was a huge amount of money at the time but I loved playing piano, and since we didn't even have a television I needed something to occupy my time!

Throwback Thursday: ghosts of July past

For Throwback Thursday I'm going through my photo albums, looking at plants that I photographed in early July in past years but are in my garden no longer.  Some of these were lost just recently, after our coldest winter in 20 years, but some of them died from poor growing conditions, neglect, or simply because I lost interest and removed them to try something new.  As I like to tell people, the secret to being a successful gardener is to keep killing plants.

400,000 views

Clerodendrum bungei

For Throwback Thursday, I'm looking back at some of the photos I've taken over the years.  I've been using Flickr to post and share my photos online since September 2007 and I've just passed 400,000 views on my DC Tropics Flickr account.  That's a pretty random milestone and I should note that I only checked it after a friend and fellow Flickr user announced that he had reached 10 million views.

So far I've posted almost 3,800 photos.  Many Flickr users have posted far more photos than that (my friend has over 62,000 photos posted) but like many of those users I'm not very happy with Flickr lately (suffice to say their ugly and clunky "new and improved" version sucks) but there are still some things I like about Flickr.

Happy birthday, Mom

I was going through some old photos last night and came across this one from my high school graduation in 1980.  I really like this photo because we all look so happy, and I especially love my mom's smile.  It's hard to believe that in this photo from 34 years ago, my parents are both younger than I am now.

Throwback Thursday: summer of 1984

This isn't my favorite photo of myself, but it shows some of the people I worked with in the summer of 1984, just after graduating from Cornell University.  That summer helped change the direction of my life when I worked as a seasonal gardener at the Cornell Plantations in Ithaca, New York.  I had gone along with my friend Jim Steuerlein, an ornamental horticulture major who was looking for a summer job and had heard they were hiring, and I was looking for work myself as I was about to graduate with a degree in Entomology and had no job lined up.  Almost on a lark I decided to apply, and I was hired.

Throwback Thursday

It was 1974 or so when my entire family--all 6 of us--plus my cousin and grandfather piled into our blue station wagon for our first trip to Florida.  How we managed the 2-day drive without the kids killing each other--or our parents killing any of us--I don't know.  We stopped to visit my cousins in Lynchburg, Virginia along the way, where my grandfather stayed while the rest of us made our way to central Florida, somewhere outside Orlando where my father had arranged for us to rent a tiny cottage by a lake for a week.  The lake even had an alligator, which people fed from the dock.

We took day trips to visit tourist attractions like Cypress Gardens, Weeki Wachee, Disneyworld, Bok Singing Tower, Kennedy Space Center, and Parrot Jungle*, where the above photo was taken.  My father said to me a few years ago that he thought he had over-planned our family trips, and that we should have spent more time relaxing.  Nothing could be further from the truth!  I reassured him that I loved the trips and all the things our family did.

That trip to Florida made a huge impression on me.  I remember orange groves, and palms trees, but the "Jungle Cruise" at Disneyworld probably made the biggest impression on me and I came home dreaming of tropical plants and landscapes, determined to somehow reproduce them even if only in miniature.  So when you see me working with palms, bananas, and elephant ears in my back yard, what you're seeing is that 12-year-old kid all grown up but still dreaming.



* Does anybody else remember a "Parrot Jungle" from the 1970's?  This apparently now-defunct attraction would have been somewhere near Orlando, not the Parrot Jungle in Miami.