Florida Native Plant Society Blog

by Travis MacClendon L. peruviana, the FLEPPC Category I plant that ignited my "need for names" gene. Photo by Matthew Merritt. What is it? In the early '90s I walked out of my apartment in Melbourne, Fl and became transfixed by a display of gorgeous yellow flowers in the nearby shrubbery. My immediate thought was, “what are those things?!” Let me digress. I believe that some people are born with a “need for names” gene, myself among them. I simply cannot see an unfamiliar star, beetle, or snowfall without feeling compelled to know its name. It never ceases. “What is it?” is practically my mantra. It often takes me twice as long as others to read a book or article because I am constantly accessing my smart phone to look things up using Google and/or Bing. And thank you, thank you STEM for that Droid, which has freed me of the burden of toting paper, pencil, and an unabridged dictionary. Compulsory tools for the "name needer" and "botanize...

Top: aerial image taken before the MacClendons moved in Bottom: aerial taken approximately one year ago by Laurie Sheldon It was a dairy farm for 20 years, and before that, a farm farm - you know, with plows and crops and the like. In early 2005 the MacClendons purchased the property hoping restore its native plant communities and create a more natural landscape for it to remain in indefinitely. I checked out an aerial of the site, but had a hard time wrapping my head around just how big it was. To put it in perspective, I decided to go to the Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser’s website to see what the lot dimensions were at the address where I grew up. I remembered it as being large - we had a pool that ran long-ways into the yard with sizable patio surrounding it, and still had room for a shed, a play house, a jungle-gym type of structure to climb on, and enough lawn left over for our dogs to run around at full speed. “Oh,” I said aloud, reading the folio data on my comput...