A bleeding heart blooms along the path of the butterfly garden.
Garden accessories have been repurposed,
such as this fountain surrounded by bromeliads.
Star fruit are ready for picking.
Photos by Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
By Deborah S. Hartz-Seeley
On three city lots owned by the Boca Raton Garden Club, butterflies drift from bloom to bloom pausing only for a sip of nectar. Showy yellow and white roses as well as pastel pink ones compete for attention. And the street noise is a mere background to the singing and chirping of birds perched in the old oaks and royal poincianas.
This garden is a labor of love for about a dozen Dirt Gardeners, members of the BRGC who cultivate and maintain it. “You’ll quickly realize that this is a haven for those who visit and those who work in it,” says landscape chairwoman Carol Rice.
Although the garden is on private land, the public will have an opportunity to visit when BRGC hosts its Holiday House fundraiser this month. Handmade wreaths, ornaments, centerpieces, Christmas trees, angels, swags and more fashioned from nature’s bounty — including palm fronds, seed pods, pine cones and shells — will be for sale. In the garden, you’ll discover the Dirt Gardeners selling what they have propagated from cuttings and seeds.
“We will have hundreds of plants available,” Rice says, pointing to pots lined up around the garden just waiting.
While you are here, take time from the holiday activity to enjoy the garden itself.
Start in the parking lot near where a succulent garden features cactus and variegated agave as well as the sword-like leaves of the Spanish bayonet. Nearby a bromeliad garden is shaded by two black olive trees and the official tree of Boca Raton, the Hong Kong orchid.
Here, as throughout the garden, you’ll notice statuary and a variety of containers repurposed as garden frippery. “I think it’s these touches that add charm to our garden,” Rice says.
For example, the cement tier of a defunct fountain is now filled with pink and red crown-of-thorns and variegated bromeliads. A cherub holding a shell stands on the rim of a birdbath. And a well-used wheelbarrow is a fertile place to grow flowers.
Many of these decorative pieces have been scavenged or donated to the club. “People just leave us things. When we come here in the morning we never know what we will find,” says Rice, who has personally rescued pottery and garden statuary from refuse piles in her neighborhood.
In the garden behind the clubhouse, Rice points to the prolific carambola tree covered with what look like orange Japanese lanterns but are actually ripening star fruit. “You’d pay $2 apiece for those in the store,” she says.
Elsewhere in the garden you may have a chance to bite into the brown fruit of a sapodilla tree that, if ripe, may remind you of a juicy pear. If not, its tannin will make you pucker.
Around the perimeter of the property is a pink garden featuring plenty of bougainvillea growing under a powder puff tree. And there’s a yellow garden tucked under a gumbo limbo. Adding to the color scheme is the yellow-green foliage of sweet potato vines as well as the bright yellow blooms of thryallis and hibiscus.
Nearby is the Japanese garden that is the work of an Eagle Scout. Paebbles cover the ground instead of the pine-bark mulch used elsewhere. The area is graced with towering blue-green bamboo, white crinum lilies with variegated leaves and a jade plant in a pot resembling a bonsai tree.
With the help of another Eagle Scout who laid paths and built a trellis, a butterfly garden thrives. You enter it under an archway covered with red and purple bleeding hearts to find such plants as fragrant sweet almond, coreopsis with its bright orange flowers, gently blue plumbago, red salvias and fuzzy red chenille plants.
As we speak, the butterflies are busy and we pause to admire them. “This is a quiet, peaceful and entirely therapeutic place that offers the solitude we all enjoy and need,” Rice says.
Deborah S. Hartz-Seeley is a certified master gardener who can be reached at debhartz@att.net when she’s not in her garden.
CHANGE OF PLANS
The Delray Beach Children’s Garden grand opening, planned for Nov. 9, has been postponed until January. For updates, call 716-8342 or visit www.delraybeach childrensgarden.org.
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