Florida Native Plant Society Blog

Building living shorelines can help Florida's declining water quality, and my co-authors and I are trying to determine the interest level and need for a book on this topic. The book would be useful for homeowners both on and off the water, landscape designers and architects, marine contractors, sustainability personnel, native plant enthusiasts, and anyone interested in how living shorelines function.   Please help! We'd like to know if you are interested in a book about LIVING SHORELINES FOR FLORIDA. In the comments, please be specific about your interest, and why. For example, answer "YES, (or no), because..."   The book would focus on salt-water/estuarine systems, but would also include conceptual information on freshwater ponds.   Chapters would include information on mangroves, living shoreline plants, oyster reefs, how living shorelines concepts can work for you even if you live on a canal, and basic "how-to" information. There will even be information...

Hartley Press in Jacksonville, FL In the first post about The Palmetto , we talked about the process that editor Marjorie Shropshire goes through to put the magazine together. We left off with the process of Marjorie's sending the file of the designed publication to the printer. Now we'll talk about what happens then. The printing company is Hartley Press , a family owned company in Jacksonville, FL. They have been printing and mailing out the Palmetto magazines in full color for FNPS since Marjorie become the editor and designer in 2006. The previous rendition of The Palmetto included only partial color on slick paper, which was a step up from the first Palmettos. Those were printed in black and white on rough newsprint type paper. While the content has always been good as you can see on our Palmetto archive page on the FNPS website, we've come a long way over the years. I took a tour of the facilities at Hartley Press a few weeks ago to learn more about how The P...

Marjorie Shropshire Photo by Anne Cox Marjorie Shropshire is an FNPS behind-the-scenes treasure! She's a longtime FNPS member, and since 2005, she's the one who puts together our slick little magazine filled with science, plant highlights, gardening, and more. While it's only sixteen pages, it is crammed full with useful and interesting content and it's a lot of work to put it together. This particular issue from last year, with Dick Workman's instructions on how to make a basket out of one palmetto leaf, sparked a flurry of activity after it was posted on the FNPS Facebook page. It was shared more than 100 times and several people joined FNPS right then so they could receive this issue of the magazine with their new membership package. And now Dick will be running a hands-on workshop at the upcoming conference. It's limited to 25 people, so if you wish to join in, register today , because the workshop is filling up. Building a magazine Here's a r...

Royal palms ( Roystonea regia ) at the Four Arts Center in Palm Beach. Regal! What would the Florida landscape be without our palm trees? Those gracefully curved trunks and topknots of fronds are mainstays of any tropical setting. While many palms serve as trees in the landscape, they are not true trees, botanically speaking, because they don't have a cambium layer under a coating of bark and cannot develop annual layers of wood like actual trees. Palms are monocots and are more like grasses. A cross-section of a palm shows a curly or random fibrous grain rather than annual rings. This arrangement of woody tissue is usually quite flexible, making palms an excellent choice for wind tolerant landscaping. A palm cross-section shows that there are no annual rings and no true wood--just a fibrous mass. After a palm seed sprouts, the plant goes into the establishment phase for several years when it looks and behaves like a shrubby palmetto. This time is necessary for the...