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The Tarflower Chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society
Volume XVXIII • January 2011
JANUARY 4, 2011 PROGRAMLandscape maintenance tips
from Troy Springer of Springer Environmental
When Springer Lawn Care first opened in 1990, it was a traditional landscape company. But owner Troy Springer’s concern about the negative affect traditional practices had on the environment led him to transform his business model and embrace native and environmentally-friendly landscaping techniques. Today, Springer Environmental is a leader in “green” landscaping. Join Troy Springer as he shares what he has learned from his many years of research and field time. Learn his strategies for developing an aesthetically-pleasing, low-maintenance landscape that requires less water and chemicals and is friendly to wildlife.
FEbRUARY 1 PROGRAM Catherine Bowman presents “To Pull or Not To Pull”
FEbRUARY 12 FIELD TRIPIsle of Pine Preserve: Orange County’s
Newest Wilderness Preserve
JANUARY 2011 FIELD TRIP by John CentoWinter Escape to the Coast
Saturday, January 8thHappy New Year, Tarflower Members! A hard freeze has
diminished Central Florida’s blooms. What are botanizers to do? Last year we enjoyed Brevard County’s state-of-the-art nature center and maritime hammocks along the Atlantic Coast. This January 8th, we will swing over to Gulf waters to visit Pinellas County’s Weedon Island Preserve just north of Saint Petersburg. We will meet at the preserve’s cultural and natural history center on Saturday morning at 10:00 am to begin our discovery.
Emma Mason of our sister Pinellas Chapter will be our volunteer guide during our three-part visit. Hurray for volunteers! Consider becoming one! Tarflower Chapter needs you.
Back to the trip: First, we will botanize the mangroves. After a picnic lunch comes part two of our visit during which Emma will guide us through the preserve’s uplands. To top off our day, in part three, we will tour the cultural and natural history center, leaving with a better understanding of how the native peoples lived on Weedon Island so many years ago.
A brief history Nomadic archaic populations began to settle about 5,000 years ago along the rich estuaries and coastal resources in the central Gulf coast area and became the Manasota cultures. Some 1,800 years ago these sedentary people began to create social structure, ceremonialism and sophisticated artistic pottery, evolving into the Weedon Island culture lasting some 800 years. After the Civil War, Weedon Island became the homestead of early settlers and by the 1900s, entered a colorful modern history of airports, speakeasies and Hollywood movies.
Flora In terms of flora to study, the paved and unimproved trails extend through the Preserve’s upland communities of pine flatwoods, maritime hammock and scrub.
Weedon Island Preserve is an approximately 3,164-acre preserve that extends along the west side of Tampa Bay in Pinellas County. It is the largest estuarine preserve in Pinellas County, and is predominately comprised of aquatic habitats with mangrove swamps, shoreline and seagrass beds along the eastern edge of the Preserve. The landward sections of the
continued on page 3
A NEW “DRIvE” FOR CONSERvATIONWould you like to help preserve Florida’s wildlife? With the
purchase of the “Save Wild Florida” license plate sponsored by the Florida Biodiversity Foundation, you can help conserve Florida’s beautiful nature. Proceeds from the sales of this tag will help:
• Conserve Florida’s diverse native wildlife and natural places.
• Support critical scientific research leading to better management and proactive strategies for conservation.
• Promote wildlife viewing and environmental education for Floridians and visitors, directly benefiting Florida’s economy.
• Help support the mission of the state’s Florida Museum of Natural History and its McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity.
For only a few dollars, you can have this special license plate and know that your contribution will help save Florida’s wildlife and natural environment! For more information, visit http://floridabiodiversityfoundation.com/.
January Tarpaper Page 2
Nature Wise“Defenders of the Environment”
Awards DinnerSponsored by: OUC The Reliable One
March 5, 2011, 6:00–9:00pm, Sonest Hotel Orlando Downtown
Please join use as we celebrate those throughout Florida who are doing good for the environment. Locally, we will be recognizing people who are helping the environment through our and additionally giving out our Environmentalist of the Year Award recognizing a life’s work. Plus, we’ll be giving children awards for their drawings of native wildlife.
Journalist and environmentalist Juanita Greene (recently featured in the PBS series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea) will give a presentation on her achievements as an environmentalist and receive the 2011 Nature Wise Environmentalist of the Year Award acknowledging a lifetime of achievements helping wildlife and preserving our environment. Juanita Greene spearheaded the movement to stop commercial development of Biscayne Bay in the 1960s. Greene persuaded the Miami Herald, which favored development, to cover the budding opposition movement and allow her to write occasional opinion pieces advocating her point of view. Along
with others, she worked to have Biscayne Bay protected as a national park. (In the words of Juanita Greene, “Just driving to Key Biscayne and looking at the open water to the south is an interesting experience. It is gratifying to know that the area never will become another Key Biscayne or Miami Beach, as originally intended. It will always be a water wilderness where visitors can fish and swim and scuba dive, and the area will be kept as pristine as possible.) A longtime friend of Marjory Stoneman Douglas (who helped create Everglades National Park), Greene later became a leader of Friends of the Everglades, an organization founded by Douglas.
Nature Wise Defenders of the Environment Awards Dinner - Social Reception - Dinner - Art with a Purpose Children’s Art Contest Awards Presentation - Defenders of the Environment Awards Presentations - Speech by Juanita Greene about her life’s work as an environmentalist - Environmentalist of the Year Award presentation to Juanita Greene
- Florida wildlife oil painting performance throughout the evening by Karen Harrod of Harrod Design including wildlife artwork available for purchase.
Raise moNey foR fNPs With
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visit www.goodsearch.com to find out more
SELL YOUR CREATIONS ON FNPS’ NEW ONLINE STORE
Thanks to the generous donation of FNPS member, Greg Krolczyk, FNPS will soon launch an online store. In addition to FNPS and chapter merchandise like tshirts and hats, the online store will provide a place for local artists to sell their wares.
If you or someone you know is a photographer, painter, seamstress, candymaker, basketweaver or anyone else with handmade goods to sell, contact Greg at 321-243-8287 or [email protected] and he will get you set up. Greg is donating his time, but FNPS will take a 25% commission from each sale. Contact him soon to make sure your goods are available when the online store is launched.
bACKYARD vISITORThis gorgeous male painted bunting was recently spotted hanging out at a backyard feeder in southwest Orange County. Thanks to Bea Stein for sharing this photo. Who’s visiting your backyard? Email your backyard visitor photos to [email protected].
January Tarpaper Page 3
Do you have a story you’d like to share with other Tarflower members? Is there an upcoming event you’d like to promote? Or maybe there’s something you’d like us to cover in a future issue. Send your articles, events, ideas, photos and suggestions to Stacey Matrazzo, Tarpaper Editor, at [email protected]. (Please do not reduce or compress photos before sending; a size of 3x4 at 300dpi is preferred.) The deadline to submit an article, event or announcement for the February issue is January 15.
TWO SCOUTS COMPLETE EAGLE PROJECT AT ShADOW bAY PARK by Paul Eisenbrown
Wesley Mullins and Ian Hall recently completed their Eagle projects by helping with some restoration and signage to enhance the valuable scrub habitat at Shadow Bay Park. Both are members of Troop 6, sponsored by St. Luke’s United Methodist Church.
In October, Wesley and his team of scouts cleared out a large section of the scrub by removing plants and groundcover that would naturally have succumbed to fire, thus restoring the area to more of its original state. We’re anxious to see what pops up in the spring.
In December, Ian provided nine graphic signs that allow the walking public to identify some of the key plants that inhabit the scrub. He raised the money through grants and garage sales, worked with a graphics vendor to make the signs, bought all the posts and materials and organized the installation with his fellow scouts.
Shadow Bay Park has become a prized location for endangered plants, which include the scrub lupine, scrub morning glory and Paronychia chartacea. The park has also become a seed bank for Bok Sanctuary’s endangered plant program. Many of the plants provided in recent scrub lupine restorations were grown from Shadow Bay seeds.
Many thanks to the park staff, its volunteers and the families of the scouts for supporting these projects. It is truly a team effort. Come out and take a walk in the scrub to see what’s blooming.
January Field Trip, continued from page 1Preserve contain some xeric and mesic upland communities of pine flatwoods, scrub, scrubby flatwoods and hammocks. The extensive cultural history of the Preserve helped shape the land with shell middens and mounds as well as a pine timber logging industry and the patchwork of mosquito ditches made in the mid 1900s.
Visitors to Weedon Island Preserve can enjoy the preserve and its natural wonders through many recreation activities: • A fishing pier• A 45-foot observation tower• 6,600 feet of ADA accessible boardwalk with three
observation platforms• Paddling trails and launch• Over 3 miles of hiking trails• Small picnic areas• Videos and exhibits about the early peoples of Weedon
Island and Florida at the Cultural and Natural History Center
• Observation decks of the Cultural and Natural History CenterWeedon Island Preserve is open 7 days a week from dawn
to dusk. The Cultural and Natural History Center is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10AM to 4 PM.
For more information on why you do not want to miss this trip, please contact me at (407) 913-2417 or at [email protected]. For those needing a ride and those able to provide a ride, please contact me and I will try to connect both groups of folks.
If you have difficulty with mobility on unimproved trails, this maybe the perfect site to visit. Please contact me and I will contact our guide regarding a tour plan in which you can participate.
For drivers with GPS and internet surfers, please consider the information below:Weedon Island Preserve Cultural and Natural History Center 1800 Weedon Drive NE, St. Petersburg, FL 33702Phone: 727-453-6500 Web: www.weedonislandcenter.org/Email: [email protected]
haVe yoU heaRD the NeWs? fNPs has a BLoG?
Find out what the Jolly Bloggers are talking about at http://fnpsblog.blogspot.com/
visit it, bookmark it, subscribe to it, just check it out — and often!
January Tarpaper Page 4
SCRUb LUPINE by Jackie Rolly
One of my very favorite native flowers is the Scrub Lupine (Lupinus aridorum). It is a biennial or short-lived perennial growing from a soft woody base, and is quite distinctive as it is the only upright pink-flowered lupine in Florida. It survives by producing copious seeds that can remain viable for many years, waiting for a disturbance of some type to provide the conditions it needs to release it.
Lupines spend the first year as small non-flowering seedlings and the second as mature plants which flower sparingly. During the third year, however, well-grown plants assume a massive width, flower spectacularly, and die after seed dispersal. They are bee pollinated, though the gray hairstreak butterfly is known to sometimes use its common cousin, sky-blue lupine (L.
diffusus), as a larval plant. Lupines are mostly fed on by moth caterpillars and they can sometimes cause extensive leaf damage (Craig Huegel).
The sad news, though, is that the scrub lupine is on the endangered list. A number of Tarflower
and Cuplet Fern chapter members have worked with the Bok Tower Gardens Rare Plant Conservation Program to help pull this beautiful plant back from the brink. We have recently participated in planting hundreds of seedlings at Wekiwa, Tibet Butler and other sites. The following is a write up by Juliet Rynear from Bok Tower Gardens on the on-going efforts to save this plant.
lupine seedlings planted at Wekiwa in early December 2010
SAvING ThE ENDANGERED SCRUb LUPINE AND ITS hAbITAT
Scrub lupine (Lupinus westianus var. aridorum) is endemic to the Winter Haven and Mt. Dora Ridges in Central Florida. From 45 documented populations prior to 2002, only 10 remained by 2003 and merely six by 2010. Of these six wild populations, only the Lake McLeod and Shadow Bay Park populations are publicly owned and protected. Commercial and residential development has replaced scrub lupine populations, their habitat and the community of species with which they coexist.
As a legume, scrub lupine plays an important role in the scrub habitat because it is able to capture and convert atmospheric nitrogen, which is subsequently released into the soil when the plant dies. This is possible because of symbiotic relationships with mycorrhizal fungi (soil microorganisms) that have evolved with legumes over tens of millions of years. Without such species, nitrogen would not be available for other plants in the scrub habitat. Moreover, the scrub habitat itself is essential to aquifer recharge, sequestration of atmospheric carbon, the existence of thousands of endemic species, and represents the last remnants of Florida’s natural heritage.
In 2008, the Rare Plant Conservation Program at Bok Tower Gardens received a grant from the US Fish and Wildlife Service to help fund a project designed to save the scrub lupine from extinction. The project is focusing on 1) the conservation of all remaining germplasm of this species; 2) the development of successful propagation methods; and 3) the establishment of genetically diverse populations at protected sites.
To date, the project has secured germplasm from nearly all remaining wild populations into the National Collection at Bok Tower Gardens, developed successful propagation protocols, and reintroduced populations of scrub lupine onto protected sites within the plant’s historic range. To date, thousands of plants have found new homes at Lake Blue Scrub, Mackay Gardens and Lakeside Preserve, Tibet-Butler Preserve, Wekiwa Springs State Park and Bill Frederick Park at Turkey Lake.
The success of this project was made possible with the help of volunteers and partners from the Ridge Rangers, Florida DEP, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Orange County Parks and Recreation, Florida Native Plant Society, CSX Transportation, Cincinnati Zoo, University of Central Florida, The Natives, Shadow Bay Park, Tibet-Butler Preserve, Wekiwa Springs State Park, Bill Frederick Park at Turkey Lake, Mackay Gardens and Lakeside Preserve, and many others.
scrub lupine (photo courtesy of
Cindy Campbell, Rare Native Plant Curator,
Bok Tower)
vOLUNTEERS NEEDED FOR 2011 FNPS CONFERENCE!
The 2011 FNPS Conference, Patios, Preserves and Public Spaces — Making Connections, will be held in Maitland and will be co-hosted by the Tarflower chapter. Volunteers are needed to assist in the Chapter booth, with registration and field trips and with the youth program. Photographers and A/V room monitors are also needed. For details including time/shift commitments, please contact Jenny Welch, 2011 Conference Committee Chair at [email protected] or Phyllis Gray, 2011 Conference Committee Vice Chair at [email protected]. The next meeting of the conference committee will be held on Saturday, January 8, 2010 at 10am at MACTEC (4150 N. John Young Parkway, Orlando, FL 32804).
STILL TIME TO DONATE TO SAM hOPKINS GRANT
FNPS has established a grant honoring Sam Hopkins, founding member of the Society and Tarflower Chapter. Sam served as the initial vice-president and later as field trip chairman. He gave many talks on identifying native plants and for many years presented a segment entitled “What’s Blooming” at the Tarflower monthly meetings.
Members of the Tarflower chapter and friends of Sam Hopkins are encouraged to help fund this grant by sending donations to the Florida Native Plant Society, P.O. Box 278, Melbourne, Florida 32902-0278 and designating Sam Hopkins Grant, Account# 15340 on the check. In order for this grant to be awarded at the annual state conference in May, all donations must be received by February 1, 2011. All donations to this fund are tax deductible.
January Tarpaper Page 5
FNPS 2011 ENDOWMENT GRANT RESEARCh AWARDS AND CONSERvATION GRANT AWARDS
The Florida Native Plant Society maintains an Endowment Grant program for the purpose of funding research on native plants. These are small grants ($1500 or less), awarded for a one-year period, and intended to support research that forwards the mission of the Florida Native Plant Society “to promote the preservation, conservation and restoration of the native plants and native plant communities of Florida.”
FNPS Conservation Grants support applied native plant conservation projects in Florida. These are small grants ($1500 or less) awarded for a one-year period. On-the-ground native plant community restoration, land acquisition and habitat enhancement projects are examples of projects that this grant is intended to assist. To qualify for a Conservation Grant, the proposed project must be sponsored by an FNPS Chapter.
Application guidelines and details are on the FNPS Web site (www.fnps.org). Questions regarding the grant programs should be sent to [email protected].
Application deadline for the 2011 Awards is March 4, 2011. Awards will be announced at the 2011 Annual Conference in Maitland.
CALL FOR SCIENTIFIC PAPERS AND POSTER PRESENTATIONS FOR
FNPS 2011 CONFERENCEThe Florida Native Plant Society annual conference will be
held at the Sheraton Orlando North, Maitland, Florida, May 19-22, 2011. The Research Track of the Conference will include presented papers on Friday, May 20 and Saturday, May 21. Posters will be on display on Friday and Saturday and the poster session will be on Saturday afternoon.
Researchers are invited to submit abstracts on research related to native plants and plant communities of Florida including preservation, conservation and restoration. Presentations are planned to be 20 minutes in total length (15 min. presentation, 5 min. questions).
Abstracts of not more than 200 words should be submitted as an MS Word file by email to Paul A. Schmalzer at [email protected] by February 1, 2011. Include title, affiliation, and address. Indicate whether you will be presenting a paper or poster.
Tarflower ChapterFlorida Native Plant SocietyP.O. Box 536021Orlando, FL 32853-6021
President — Catherine Bowman 407-761-7109; [email protected] President (Programs) — Julie Becker; [email protected] President (Events) — Pete Dunkelberg 407-277-6242; [email protected] — Jackie Rolly 407-359-4963; [email protected] — Irene Lauricella 407-539-1069; [email protected] Trips — John Cento 407-913-2417; [email protected]ºMemberships — Phyllis Gray 407-253-5462 (W); [email protected] — Jackie Rolly 407-359-4963; [email protected] Rescue — Marge Holt 407-679-6759Editor —Stacey Matrazzo; [email protected] — Chuck Roux 407-851-8889; [email protected] — http://www.fnps.org/pages/chapters/chapterpg.php?keyword=Tarflower
SOCIETY NEWS Chapter Meetings — Chapter meetings are held the first
Tuesday each month at hARRY P. LEU GARDENS, (1920 N. Forest Avenue, Orlando). The next meeting is Tuesday, January 4 at 7pm. See you there! (For directions, call 407-246-2620 option 1).
Executive Committee — The next board meeting will be Thursday, January 13, 2010 at 6pm. For more information, contact Catherine Bowman. Members are welcome to attend.
The Tarpaper Online! — Current and past issues of The Tarpaper can be viewed online by accessing the chapter website at www.fnps.org. Click on Chapters -> Tarflower and follow the instructions to The Tarpaper!
bECOME A MEMbERMake checks payable to:
Florida Native Plant SocietyP.O. Box 278Melbourne, FL 32902-0278
To join online or for more information, visit www.fnps.org or call 321-271-6702.
$35 Individual$50 Family/Household$15 Full-time Student$15 Library$50 Non-Profit$75 Contributing$100 Supporting $125 Business/Corporate $250 Donor$1000 Life
