Tending your garden oasis with insect- and bird-friendly foliage is a win for all

Coral honeysuckle will add a spark of color to any green landscape, and will bring in hummingbirds.

March 4, 2024

When Martha Stewart was asked to define happiness at a recent Palm Beach luncheon, she didn’t hesitate with her answer. If you want to be happy for a year, she said, get a husband (It was a mostly woman’s event). If you want to be happy for a decade, get a dog. But if you want to be happy for the rest of your life, start a garden. 

I can’t think of a better answer and I totally agree, although not about the husband part — I’ve had mine for 45 years, and it hasn’t been that bad.

But here in Palm Beach, where we could all have the most lush, beautiful gardens in the country, many of us have opted instead for perfectly manicured, formal landscapes treated with massive doses of chemicals. This is definitely NOT what Martha was talking about when she recommended having a garden.  

A garden is a living, vibrant oasis full of beauty not only in plant material, but also in the wildlife that frequent this oasis.

Bright yellow flowers of Bahama Senna add a splash of sunshine to a sunny area and is a host plant for the orange barred sulphur butterfly.

There should be music in birdsong, buzzing insects and pollinators, chirping squirrels, crickets and maybe the occasional frog. Fragrance is another essential element, drawing you into the heart of the garden and engaging your most stimulating sense.

And color is a must — these green clipped landscapes that are passed off as gardens have no soul — there’s no inspiration or excitement. Adding the pop of purple from a passionflower vine growing up a tree, (the host plant for the wonderful zebra heliconian butterfly) or a burst of reddish orange from coral honeysuckle on an arbor (this brings in hummingbirds!) or some bright sparkling yellow from Bahama senna, which hosts the orange-barred sulphur, could help transform a landscape into a garden.

There’s nothing more delightful than walking into your garden at the end of the day to the divine fragrance of night blooming jasmine, brunfelsia, gardenia, or sweet almond bush — even orchids emit a sweet fragrance in the evening.  

 Formal landscapes are fine per se. If this is what you love, then by all means prune your hedges or bushes into mounds, balls, cones, columns, pyramids, walls and arbors — whatever shapes you like. But remember that shearing your plants will shorten their lives, and spraying pesticides on everything is not necessary. Green island ficus, which is widely used in manicured landscapes, does not need pesticides at all.

I understand the difficulty in letting a beautiful, well established ficus hedge go, but at some point we all have to factor in the documented damage caused by the pesticides necessary to maintaining these hedges. Decades of validated studies have proven that the chemicals we are using on our trees, lawns, hedges, and flowers are all carcinogenic; they kill bees, butterflies and pollinators in addition to the pests for which they are prescribed. As nerve agents, they damage the developing nervous systems of children and are definitively linked to Parkinson’s, leukemia, cancers and autism.

A hedge of Simpson stopper, wild coffee and thatch palms.

The pesticide used to treat white fly on your ficus hedges is called Merit, and the chief ingredient is imidacloprid, a known carcinogen and systemic neonicotinoid that makes every part of the plant poisonous, killing any insect, bee or butterfly that happens to land on a leaf, stem, fruit or flower. It can last for months or years in the soil and leaches easily into our groundwater. How many of your pets have developed cancers or tumors from repeated exposure to your neighbors’ lawns?

We know this, and yet we continue to pay “professionals” to treat our yards and landscapes with these deadly chemicals. Many of the plants being treated don’t even need pesticides. How is this even remotely sane?  

I began these articles with the hope that people would plant more natives to bring in the pollinators and insects necessary to birds and wildlife. But no amount of natives can counteract the massive quantities of chemicals we continually pour onto our landscapes. I have so much milkweed in my garden for monarchs, as well as host plants for zebra longwings, orange barred sulphurs, atalas, crescents, swallowtails, Julias and fritillaries, but I haven’t seen a single butterfly this season. Last year at this time, my garden was full of them.

Simpson Stopper is one of the best native hedge plants with flowers, brilliant red berries and beautiful foliage.

There are 50% fewer insects in the world today than there were just 15 years ago and we ignore this rate of decline at our own peril. Without insects, life on earth cannot exist — it’s as simple as that.  

And why do we want to exterminate all these creatures, which are the very basis of our food chain, in the first place? The pervasive sticky sweet smell of pesticides is awful; after your technician has treated your property, you cannot sit outside and appreciate your garden or swim in your pool or even relax on your lawn. And you certainly shouldn’t let your children or pets outside. On windy days, if you aren’t spraying, someone else on your block most likely is; the drift will make its way to your property so you shouldn’t go outside then either.

And when it rains, all these chemicals run to the Intracoastal where they poison fish and other invertebrates, cause algal blooms which are deadly to our manatees, our pets and ourselves, and infect our drinking water. 

Aren’t we here in Florida because of the beautiful climate and wonderful outdoor activities we all enjoy? Why jeopardize our health and that of our children, neighbors and pets by spraying poisons all over our landscapes? This probably isn’t much of an issue for many Palm Beachers, but think of the monetary savings of not spraying!  

Florida boxwood makes a dense hedge and has lovely red berries for birds.

If you are considering replacing your ficus hedge, but aren’t sure how, there are so many beautiful natives which will provide a far more interesting, diverse and sustainable border. You won’t miss your ficus at all when you have a thick native hedge attracting numerous songbirds and butterflies, and to which you never apply pesticides. 

For sunny areas, try Simpson stopper, Spanish stopper, white stopper, silver buttonwood, green buttonwood, saw palmetto, sabal palms, thatch palms, fishtail palms, seven year apple, live oak, Jatropha, Bahama strongbark, Florida firebush, Florida privet, Florida boxwood, yellow elder, fiddlewood, seagrape, Wild lime, and Shortleaf fig (yes, it’s a ficus but it’s also native and is the host plant for the beautiful ruddy daggerwing butterfly). For shadier areas, wild coffee, cocoplum, torchwood, cinnamon bark, satin leaf, pigeon plum, red stopper, inkwood, Jamaica caper, crabwood, marlberry, myrsine, maidenbush, dahoon holly, ironwood, lancewood, bitterbush, and blackbead will provide beauty, diversity and lots of privacy. These are just a few of the wonderful native plants from which to choose. All will bring in valuable pollinators which in turn will attract songbirds and hummingbirds — and none of these require pesticides, fungicides, or chemicals of any kind.   

Flddlewood is great for hedges and has fragrant flowers as well.

 -Kim Frisbie

Original article on the Palm Beach Daily News is HERE.