Sea Hibiscus Blvd.

Time-lapse blogs are a wonderful thing. Just as time-lapse photography fast-forwards into the future, this post will now reveal the completed sea hibiscus boulevard.  

The sea hibiscuses are at this point taller than the house and must be hacked back brutally to stay in line.

My birthday present—an arched trellis that I'd been planning as the entryway—went into place about a year ago.  The Dutchman’s pipe, a bizarre plant whose flowers look like bruised scrota, has by now grown like crazy, crawled all over it, and threatens to strangle the sea grape to its right. 

One approaches this vision around the corner of the house, past the Mexican petunia bed on the left and, on the right, the heliconia, ti plant, and Plant from Mars, which got its name because I had no clue what it was.  I couldn’t find it anywhere online, and our landscaper's brother, who claims to know everything, didn't know what it was. It just grew there one day, I chop it back periodically, and it shoots up again. It has big, cabbagelike leaves with frilly white edges. It's on the right in this picture, behind the ruby-leaved ti plant.

I'm persistent to a fault. After hours of hunting for Plant from Mars online, I stumbled upon a nursery in South Carolina called Woodlanders, which specializes in unusual plants, and wrote to them via Contact Us. I apparently asked the right guy, because Bob McCartney wrote back to tell me that a contact in Gainesville told him it is Acalypha wilkesiana forma circinata, more modestly known as Jacob's coat. Like my sea hibiscus, it hails from Southeast Asia and has many medicinal uses. One website said its stalk is poisonous; others suggested boiling its leaves and drinking the tea to cure everything from pleurisy to diarrhea. I don't think this is a good idea.

Here's Bob McCartney's backstory:

In seeking out people who had been involved with the cultivation of native southern plants, the trail led to Bob McCartney at Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia. Colonial Williamsburg's gardens relied heavily on native plants and for more than a decade Bob had been collecting, propagating and introducing into the extensive gardens and grounds a wide range of seldom cultivated species.

What's so odd about all this is that I appear to have found a hobby in the last field I ever would have guessed. I've never liked gardening or considered myself a gardener--even though my mother was one. But it's just so darn easy in Florida, among all these weirdo plants that become like pets.