A frangipani bloom at the Mounts Nursery.
Extracta green sage.
Tom Hewitt (left) speaks to customers at the Mounts Nursery.
Photos by Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
By Deborah S. Hartz-Seeley
Anyone who visits Mounts Botanical Garden in West Palm Beach is sure to appreciate the Louis Philippe roses in the rose garden, the fragrant herbs in the vegetable garden and the butterfly-attracting buddleia in the butterfly garden.
If you’d like to add these to your own garden, you probably won’t find them at the usual garden stores.
Instead, visit the southeast corner of the botanical garden itself. Find the chain link gate and if it’s a Monday or Thursday morning or the first Saturday of the month, it will be open.
“It’s too bad but most people don’t even know we are here,” says Tom Hewitt, a volunteer who oversees this area called the Mounts Nursery.
As you enter, you’ll find a quarter-acre where wire-topped tables hold small pots of well-labeled plants. As you browse, you’ll discover such rarities as Extracta sage and tropical hollyhock.
And you’ll be introduced to new things such as sambung, a Southeast Asian plant with crisp green leaves you can eat in a salad. There’s popalo that looks like fennel but tastes like cilantro blessed with a touch of citrus. And then consider katuk with leaves that taste like fresh peas.
“Anything that is in the botanical garden can be propagated and put on sale back here,” says Lois Mahoney, who had a hand in creating this nursery over a decade ago.
A volunteer in training to become a master gardener, she was weeding the botanical garden one day when she came across an overgrown greenhouse.
“There were palm trees coming out of your ears,” she says, remembering what she found. But that greenhouse also was full of weeds. “It was a mess.”
Others told her not to bother with it but that didn’t stop her. “Before you knew it, people were bringing me plants and having me do clippings from the garden to grow here,” she says.
That’s when she and Garden Director Allen Sistrunk along with about eight other people created the guild that today mans the nursery and does fundraising for the botanical garden. Last year the guild donated almost $40,000 to the garden.
At age 82, Mahoney now tends the rose garden; master gardener Hewitt has taken over as guild coordinator. He still works with about a dozen volunteers who tend and propagate 200 varieties of mostly herb and butterfly plants so that they can be offered for sale or used to replenish the botanical garden.
“As a botanical garden, we owe it to the public to offer plants they won’t find anywhere else,” Sistrunk says.
That’s why in the nursery you’ll find rare and endangered Florida natives such as seashore ageratum that’s indigenous to the Keys and shrub thoroughwort. You also can purchase exotics that have adapted well to our hot, humid weather, including the tropical aster, tree dahlia and giant salvia.
Children are welcome to bring paper cups to collect butterfly caterpillars that they can release at home. After all, if left in the nursery those caterpillars will eat many of the plants Hewitt is trying to propagate for sale, including fennel, milkweed and parsley.
If you have questions, guild members are there to help. “We give the right information you need to grow things in South Florida. And we find many people come back just for our advice,” Hewitt 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.
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