Gardens - IndianRiverMagazine.com

Garden Variety

STORY AND PHOTOS BY SUSAN BURGESS

Dale Galiano’s passion is unusual plants. They fill her Port St. Lucie back yard almost to overflowing.
“The ones I seem to always want are the ones that have that ‘wow factor’ for me,” she says. So, in her yard you will find Petting Bamboo – so called because its soft green billowy shape begs for stroking. And it really is soft to the touch. Then there is the unusual Chrysanthemum Tree, with its chrysanthemum-petal-like, ball-shaped white flowers. And her Curry Tree with leaves that are dried and used as part of the ingredients in curry. And the pale Ghost Cactus.

Her Palm Grass reaches for the sky, with its young-palm-like leaves and feathery tassel-like tops. A Cherries Jubilee Alamanda with deep mauve, bell-like flowers gracefully moves in the breeze. A Traveler’s Palm is named for its ability to contain water within the stem of its fronds, making it a lifesaver for travelers crossing a desert all the way back to Biblical times.

“I like learning these things. It makes gardening so much more interesting.”

Galiano collects a variety of plants, including flowering ornamentals, bushes, trees, orchids, cacti, succulents, bromeliads, lilies, and fruiting trees, all planted in the back yard of her quarter-acre lot. She uses their common names rather than their more complicated Latin names “because no one ever remembers them.”

As a graduate of the St. Lucie County Cooperative Extension Office’s Master Gardener program, she puts her knowledge to good use, speaking to homeowner associations, garden clubs and other organizations. She’s a member of a mentoring program for would-be master gardeners and was named Master Gardener of the Year about three years ago.

In the seven years she’s lived at her house in Port St. Lucie, just east of St. Lucie West on the south side of Prima Vista, Galiano has turned her back yard into a miniature botanical garden filled with more than 600 plants and winding paths leading from one section to another, each with a different microclimate.

“I didn’t really believe in ‘microclimates’ for back yards before this,” she says, “but now I do.”

Microclimates refer to the immediate environment a plant finds itself in – shady, sunny, wet, damp, dry, crowded or spacious, soil types and other factors that encourage its growth or not.

“The yard was a blank canvas when we moved in,” she says. It is an apt description and one that came readily to her mind because she paints in oils. She also paints flower pots, watering cans, stones, and anything else that has a likely use in her backyard botanical garden.

Adding a whimsical touch, blue bottles hang upside down on clusters of poles. The upside down bottles are said to capture evil spirits and trap them so they can’t get out, she said.

Elsewhere, a round pot is painted to resemble a tiger’s face while a nearby paving stone resembles a ladybug with red wings.

She takes her garden seriously, spending at least eight hours a week working in it. Gardening has also taught her that plants have minds of their own when it comes to blooming and taking root. Some will only grow new roots during certain times of the year; some stubbornly bloom on their own private schedules. It’s just a matter of experimenting and if something doesn’t work now, then try it later, she said.

She works on plants in her extensive potting shed, getting them ready to go out into the garden or into the lattice shade house her husband built for her.

“Everyone has an area in their garden where nothing wants to grow,” she said.

“That’s where you put the hardy ones such as the dwarf alamanda,” she said. “It’s a bush form that is so indestructible that it is often planted at mailboxes where it receives little to no care, and a lot of people just call it ‘the mailbox plant.’”

Adding that “wow factor” to the mailbox is easy, she says. “I like native grasses because they don’t take much water, and then there’s the Crown of Thorns which comes with bright red flowers and now they come in a creamy yellow too, and they’ll just keep growing and look beautiful with some grass and perhaps the dwarf Alamanda next to them.”

“Gardening is a continuum,” she says. “It’s endless, like the Hawaiian Sunset vine. One cluster of flowers blooms, and lasts a day or two, and a new one begins. It's like gardening itself. I am a constant collector and as soon as I find one, I am off to find another, and it will always be that way for me.”

Garden Variety

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