The Darwinian Gardener’s moratorium on removing dead plants has ended now that it’s April.
Only last week, tree guys swarmed his backyard to take down a massive laurel oak that had been living in tree hospice for years. Its blackened top branches blew off in the last windstorm. The city arborist had pointed at it months ago and just shook her head.
And that bamboo palm leaning against the back porch? The one his wife complains about? The one that had metamorphosed from a cute houseplant into an outdoor monster, blocking the back door? Ground down to wood sprinkles.
But hold on, who is this person rousing himself in the spring to tend to this overgrown Florida backyard? Who is this person calling himself “The Darwinian Gardener”?
The Darwinian Gardener is Florida’s foremost exponent of survival-of-the-fittest lawn-and-garden care. He is not out to defeat nature with advanced chemistry and tedious coddling. He is not his yard’s healing shaman. He is his yard’s emergency room intake nurse working the late shift.
He’s good with whatever comes his way and is unsentimental about plant life that doesn’t have the moxie to meet the challenges of his beloved USDA Plant Hardiness Zone 9 yard. And come April, he again shoulders his clippers and takes up the cry, “bring out your dead!”
Which, naturally, makes this a good time to ask the Darwinian Gardener:
You just let your plants die in the winter? Aren’t you ashamed?
Q: Why didn’t you take minimal precautions before the winter freezes? Do you regret causing so much plant death?
A: The Darwinian Gardener was busy during the holidays. It’s a time when he takes a break from all yard work. He ignores plants that regularly swoon in wintertime. How was he to know that this time they really meant it?
The hibiscus and croton that used to bounce back in past years after their play-dead acts, this year look dead, dead, dead.
Nor is he alone. On yard-trash-pickup days he notices up and down his block piles of former crotons, shrubs, palms, hibiscus, and especially sea grapes. Sea grapes have a way of looking deader than other plants after a hard freeze.
And he notices a lot of Norfolk Island pines have turned rust colored. Nobody should be surprised. This isn’t Norfolk Island.
Nope. It’s not just his yard. Not just his fault.
What do ‘Star Trek’ and Florida have in common? Quite a bit, actually
Q: What are you doing about the drought?
A: First the freezes, then a drought. Another hard year on the yard.
Remember that episode of “Star Trek” where space hippies found a planet that looked like paradise only to find out that everything there was poisonous and the place seemed designed to kill them? The Darwinian Gardener considers that a metaphor for Florida. Especially in summertime’s hurricane season.
We and our plants live on a rollercoaster of wet and dry. Drought and fires or rain and floods. We’re in a drought cycle just now with wildfires popping up all around the state. Walking on his patchy lawn, he hears it crunch beneath his feel like he’s walking across a field of old newspapers.
Hey, St. Augustine lawn! Man up!
Q: So are you finally fixing your sprinkler system?
A: Heavens no. After the hurricanes of 2004, the Darwinian Gardener vowed on the blood of his ancestors never to dig up and replace another sprinkler head. His days of providing St. Augustine grass with the illusion that it’s exempt from Florida’s drought cycles were over.
No need to empty a perfectly good aquifer to make that stuff happy. He sits back to see what can pull through dry times.
Q: Did you dig up your sad hibiscus stumps?
A: Softie that he is, the Darwinian Gardener still holds hope that the roots of his hibiscus plants might still stir themselves. They have until June. That’s a firm deadline.
Meanwhile, he takes pleasure in how the azaleas and beautyberry shook everything off. Salvias that looked dead popped back by Easter. He feels that they, at least, have the right spring spirit. The others, well, there’s more dead stuff to haul off. The circle of life and all that. Again: Not his fault.
Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is mlanewrites@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: The Darwinian Gardener brings out the dead
Reporting by Mark Lane, Special to The News-Journal / The Daytona Beach News-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
