Go Native Blog

Here is the debut of our YouTube channel! We have our first Native Plant Profile (below), as well as a short intro video about Wilcox Nursery. Go check it out and subscribe, so you don’t miss our new videos!

Florida Native Plant Profile: Blazing Star Transcript

Presented by: Davis Byrkit

Hey guys, welcome back to Wilcox Nursery. One of the things, when people come in, they get overwhelmed really quickly at the diversity of all the different native species that we have.

So one of the things we like to do is we like to take those out of the nursery and put those into a landscape setting.

So we will go and we’ll plant them all throughout the nursery landscape so that as you browse and you go and you look at these different plants, you can see what they all look like two, three, four years down the line. You know, all of our wildflowers are shrubs, trees, and palms, just so that you can get an idea of the characteristics and the personality of each plant. So today what we’re going to do is we’re going to take one of our most popular fall-blooming wildflowers and show you how you can incorporate it into your pollinator garden.

Here we’ve got Liatris tenufolia. It’s one of our many species of Blazing Star. But this one is a little bit more acclimated to a landscape scenario. It doesn’t get nearly as tall as some of the other species that can push, you know, six, seven feet. And it does have a little bit of a grassy head of foliage, so it’s a little bit more attractive as opposed to just a big spike.

It’s a beautiful fall bloomer towards the end of the year. It will give you some nice purple colors. You know, a backdrop to maybe Bahama cassia, some yellows, a couple of other plants when we have a lot blooming in the spring and the summer. It’s something that can add that pollinator interest, get some bees and butterflies into your yard towards the end of the year.

So here, taking a closer look we’ve got that grassy head of foliage like I said it won’t exceed maybe, you know, a foot a couple of inches, just depending on how established it is. And then once we go up here, we’ve got these beautiful spikes that’ll push three to four feet tall of those little tiny purple flowers.

And you can see a couple of bees buzzing around. I mean, they’re wonderful, wonderful nectar plants for these pollinators. So hopefully you guys liked the little plant intro we did.

We’re going to be doing a lot more of these in the future. Just trying to show you, a couple of the plants that we really like to promote here in the nursery.

And, hopefully, you guys subscribe, and, we’ll see you next time.