Garden today,May 23

Love the Caladiums! This is a lovely corner.

thanks, Bernie - I'd originally envisioned this garden as a 100% native plant area but just couldn't get the right plants some of the time. So I'd say it's about 85% native plants and the caladiums are one of my concessions. Easy to find here, inexpensive and colorful. I had no color in the summer since so many of our native woodland shade plants are spring bloomers and not very impressive bloomers at that! And many of them go dormant as temps rise, like the Arisaema in the foreground.

Laura over here the Caladiums are rather expensive and hard to find, and our natives are really quite unappealing. Funny how things can be so different.

Many believe that any tropical region has the most fabulous native plants, but in fact that's not true. I'm living in a dry tropics area and whilst there are some great native trees, the shrubs and flowers are really very scraggly and unimpressive.

Further north, in the wet tropics, there are really spectacular looking plants. But they don't grow very well here! Natives are not always the best thing since sliced bread!

So true, isn't it? Here, we're sort of in a transitional zone. Our winters are too cold to permit south Georgia plants to survive, and yet we're not quite far enough up in the hills to let north Georgia mountain weather take the edge off the summer heat. 50 miles north would make the difference. So some natives - like my umbrellaleaf - will have a tough time making it here.

My sister lives in the subtropical paradise of Sanibel Island, Florida, and now complains that it's too hot to grow the plants that were old standbys when we were growing up in the northeast! I suppose we just have to adapt to our surroundings.

That's it exactly. We all find we have to adapt and find out what works best for our particular garden space. Even in my small rural suburb things that do grow well down on the flats have a hard time up here in the foothills. There's little micro-climates everywhere!