This is my final Jar of the August garden, featuring the weeds- an inevitable feature this time of year. It has rained just shy of 11 inches in my garden since the first of August. The weeds are thriving and having a joyous outbreak of reproduction. ACK.
Recently, the mailman (a native of the Florida Keys) informed me that his mother would have pulled out all of the Beach Sunflowers in my front yard, pronouncing them weeds. He thinks I am a gardening radical. These are the yellow daisies in the vase. I cultivate them in masses in my garden, they grow with or without irrigation in plain sugar sand and form a mat that reduces the less desirable weed population. I trim them with electric hedge clippers to maintain a low mass. 
I suppose beauty is in the eye of the weed holder. Beach Sunflowers surround a Blanchetiana Bromeliad.
A closer view of my weeds: the white daisies are Bidens alba, a native Bidens prolific (producing an average of 1200 seeds per plant) to the point of making it difficult to like the flowers as well as the bees do. The pinkish-white, small, lily shaped flowers are from Florida Snow (Richardia grandiflora) – a Brazilian native that reportedly blew in with the hurricanes from the early 2000s. A low growing perennial weed that infests lawn creeping through the blades of grass then flowering until it looks like snow on the lawn. I have pulled a zillion of these, they also reseed and will grow from cuttings (lawn mower cuttings)
Tropical plants also get loose in Florida gardens, purple foliage is from Oyster Plants or Moses in a Cradle (Transcandentia spathacea). I happen to like this plant, but it reseeds with vigor and is considered invasive. Purple striped foliage is another Transcandentia I like, T. zebrina also appears unbidden in shady areas. Ferns are Asian Sword Ferns, spread by birds and tending to take over our native Boston Fern. The red tipped leafy foliage is from Surinam Cherries (Eugenia uniflora) also called Pitanga. Pitanga is a small red cherry-like fruit with an (in my opinion) not so tasty tang of turpentine spread everywhere by grateful wildlife. The wispy flowers at the top are from a plant I am not recalling the name of, have a carrot like taproot and produce hitchhiker seeds that stick to my pant legs and greyhound noses. These have different colored flowers and can be pretty – but, are always asked to leave the garden if the soil is moist enough to pull the taproot out.
Here are the three jars of August – appearing in the same repurposed pasta jar – The first, flowers:
The second, tropical flowers:
And this week, the weeds.
You may notice the weeds appear in more than one jar.
Maybe I am a gardening radical.
Another surprise in the garden was the emergence of 5 flowers on a Guzmania Bromeliad I left in a container for a little too long. I did not know Guzmanias would even put out multiple flowers, so I cut one since it went so well with the Romaine.
I could be the Mulchmeister, given the love/ hate relationship with mulch that I have nurtured for years. I love the appearance mulch gives the garden – a soothing blanket of hopefully brownish material, tucking all the plants in for good growth, saving water and helping keep weeds at bay.
Octoberflower is native to an area called Scrub in Florida – my garden is in Scrub, so you would think these plants would enjoy my garden. Not so much. I find them very difficult to place and grow, moving them into the native pollinator garden, one out of five made it. Although, they are great cut flowers.
Last week, in honor of the fifth anniversary of the meme ‘In A Vase on Monday’, Cathy, our hostess at Rambling in the Garden on WordPress challenged us to not use a vase on Monday. Hence, the watering can. My second challenge, issued by a gardening friend, to use all native wildflowers in my non vase.
