3107 Swan Ln

Our first stab at installing Florida native and Florida-friendly landscaping was in our backyard, which has some clay pockets in the soil and gets incredibly water-logged in the summertime. We ripped up the grass in the area that got the muckiest and converted it to a rain garden, with the help of a local Florida native nursery (Wilcox). The rain garden was installed in 2023, and since then, we've learned which plants don't do so hot (blue-eyed grass got instantly demolished by our resident rabbits) and which plants got a little too happy (swamp sunflower, sea ox-eye daisy, and golden canna). We plan to expand our native garden to the back half of our backyard within the next year or two, significantly minimizing the grass that once dominated the area and replacing invasive trees with native ones. We've enjoyed seeing a huge increase in butterflies and bees in our backyard.

The front yard pollinator garden has been a fun project to gradually rip out the original landscaping and replace it with all Florida native and Florida-friendly plants. The goal has been to install as many pollinator and larval host plants as possible.