Alli's Florida Garden

09/15/2026

🦋🌿 TAKE FLIGHT TUESDAY! 🌿🦋

🐛 3 Plants That Can Turn Your Yard Into a Butterfly Nursery!

Want more butterflies in your yard? Don’t just plant flowers for the adults — give their babies something to eat, too! 🥰

Here are 3 plants that can help turn your garden into a little butterfly nursery:

🌿 1️⃣ Passionvine
If you want to see Gulf fritillaries, this is a must-have! Their caterpillars feed on passionvine leaves, and you may be surprised how quickly they can find it. 🐛🦋
The flowers are beautiful, the vines are vigorous, and you get the bonus of watching the entire butterfly life cycle happen right in your garden!

🌸 2️⃣ Native Milkweed
Milkweed isn't just a pretty flower — it's a host plant for monarch caterpillars. Watching those tiny caterpillars appear and grow can be one of the most rewarding parts of having a butterfly garden. 🐛➡️🦋

🌱 3️⃣ Sunshine Mimosa
This low-growing Florida native is a fantastic addition to a wildlife-friendly garden. Its little pink puffball flowers attract pollinators, while its spreading habit makes it a great groundcover for sunny spaces. 🌸🐝🦋

💡 The secret to a true butterfly garden?

Think beyond the flowers!

🦋 Nectar plants = food for adult butterflies
🐛 Host plants = food for caterpillars

If you want butterflies to visit your yard AND reproduce there, you need both!

🌿 Plant for the whole life cycle and your garden becomes more than a flower garden — it becomes butterfly habitat. 🦋💚

What butterflies are you seeing in your yard right now? Tell me in the comments! 👇

09/14/2026

🌿✨ MONDAY PLANT OF THE WEEK! ✨🌿

20% OFF ALL MY “SAGE” PLANTS THIS WEEK!

It’s Sage Week at Alli’s Florida Garden! 💚
Whether you’re looking for colorful blooms, pollinator plants, or a native addition to your garden, I’ve got several great options available.

🌸 Scarlet Sage — Salvia coccinea
❤️ Red
🤍 White
🩷 Pink

These Florida-native sages are fantastic for attracting hummingbirds, butterflies, bees, and other pollinators while adding plenty of color to the garden!

💜 Purple Sage — Salvia misella
A smaller native sage with delicate purple flowers that makes a great addition to a Florida-friendly landscape.

🌿 Button Sage — Lantana involucrata
And here's the fun one… it isn't actually a sage at all! 😂
Button sage is a native Lantana, but its common name earns it a spot in our Sage Sale. It has clusters of small flowers followed by those distinctive little fruits and is a wonderful Florida native for wildlife and pollinators.

🐝 NATIVE • POLLINATOR FRIENDLY • FLORIDA GROWN

🔥 20% OFF ALL SAGE PLANTS — THIS WEEK ONLY! 🔥

📍 Pickup in Ruskin near Lennard High School
🌱 Grown right here at Alli’s Florida Garden
💚 Licensed Florida plant nursery

Come grab one (or several!) and add a little more life to your garden! 🌿🦋🐝🐦

09/13/2026

https://youtube.com/shorts/VKGNYsIu1rs?feature=share

Sooooo many gulf flitirary butterflies in the garden this morning!!!

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

09/13/2026

🌿☀️ SUNDAY PLAN FOR SUCCESS ☀️🌿
Time for a Garden Reset! 🌧️✂️

Whew! With all the rain we’ve gotten lately, the plants are PUSHING out some serious growth! 🌱💚

And while I love seeing that kind of growth, this week’s plan is all about getting things back under control.

✂️ Trim back the vines that have exploded with new growth
🌾 Cut back and shape up the grasses that are getting a little wild
🌱 Pull weeds while the ground is nice and soft from all this rain
🧹 Clean up around the plants and give everything a little breathing room
🌿 Check for crowded or overgrown plants that may need a little extra attention

The soft ground is especially helpful for weeding right now. Those stubborn weeds that normally put up a fight are much easier to pull after a good soaking! 🙌

And trimming isn’t just about making the garden look tidy—it can help keep vigorous plants from taking over pathways, neighboring plants, and nursery space.

🌧️ Rain + warm Florida weather = GROWTH!
So this week, I’m going to work with that growth instead of fighting it.

What’s exploding in YOUR garden after all this rain? 🌱😂

09/11/2026

Please come out and join me at Mixon Farms in Bradenton for an awesome native plant talk. I will be bringing a limited number of natives with me for sale at the event.

09/11/2026

🍽️🌿 FRIDAY FEAST: SWEETBAY MAGNOLIA 🌿🍽️

Did you know one of Florida's native magnolias can also make its way into the kitchen? 👀🌳

Meet Sweetbay Magnolia (Magnolia virginiana) — a beautiful native tree with glossy evergreen-to-semi-evergreen leaves and wonderfully fragrant flowers. 🤍

🌿 But here's the tasty part…

The aromatic leaves have traditionally been used as a seasoning, much like bay leaves! They can be used to add a subtle, spicy-aromatic flavor to things like soups, stews, and sauces.

🌸 And those gorgeous creamy-white flowers? They smell AMAZING!

🐦 Wildlife bonus: Sweetbay provides habitat and food resources for wildlife, and its flowers are visited by pollinators.

🌳 Florida-friendly native: Sweetbay naturally occurs in wet areas, swamps, along streams, and other moist habitats—but it can also be a beautiful landscape tree when given the right conditions.

🌱 This is one of those plants I love because it checks several boxes:
🌿 Native
🌸 Beautiful
🐝 Wildlife-friendly
🍽️ Historically useful in the kitchen

Would you plant a Sweetbay Magnolia in your edible landscape? 🌳🌿

As always, if you're harvesting anything for food, make sure you have the correct plant identification and research safe preparation and culinary use first.

09/10/2026

🍵🌼 THURSDAY TEA TIME: CANADIAN GOLDENROD 🌼🍵

Did you know you can make an herbal tea from Canadian Goldenrod (Solidago canadensis)?

Yep! That beautiful cloud of golden yellow flowers isn't just a pollinator favorite—it has also been traditionally brewed as an herbal tea. 🌿☕

🌼 A few things you might not know:

🐝 Pollinator powerhouse! Goldenrod provides an incredible late-season source of nectar and pollen for bees, butterflies, and many other beneficial insects.

🍵 Tea garden plant! The leaves and flowering tops have traditionally been used to make an herbal infusion. The flavor is generally described as grassy, herbal, and mildly sweet with a little astringency.

🌻 And don't blame it for your allergies! Goldenrod is often accused of causing those fall allergy symptoms, but its pollen is relatively heavy and primarily carried by insects. Wind-pollinated ragweed is much more likely to be the culprit. 🤧

🌱 And apparently… it likes to grow BIG! 😂

The Canadian goldenrod growing in my nursery has completely outgrown its 30-gallon pot. It's easily 7 feet tall when I hold it upright, and the main stem is over 1½ inches thick! Once it finishes flowering, I'm going to cut it back and move this beast into the ground where it can stretch its legs. 🌼💪

As with any plant you're considering consuming, proper identification and research into safe preparation are important. I like to talk about these plants in terms of their traditional herbal uses rather than making medicinal claims.

Would you grow goldenrod for the pollinators, the flowers, the tea… or all three? 🌼🐝🍵

09/09/2026

🌸🌿 WILDFLOWER WEDNESDAY! 🌿🌸

3 things you probably didn’t know about Sunshine Mimosa! 👀💕

This little Florida native may look delicate, but it has some pretty cool tricks!

🌸 #1 — Those pink puffballs are flowers!
Sunshine mimosa produces adorable, fluffy pink pom-pom blooms that add a pop of color right at ground level. And those blooms can attract pollinators! 🐝🦋

👆 #2 — It’s a “touch-me” plant!
Give the leaves a little tap and they fold up! This movement is called thigmonasty—a plant response to touch. 🌿

🌱 #3 — It makes a living groundcover!
Sunshine mimosa spreads along the ground instead of growing tall, making it a great native option for filling sunny spaces and creating a softer, more wildlife-friendly landscape.

And honestly… watching the leaves fold up never gets old! 😂💚

Have you ever grown Sunshine Mimosa? Did you know it could do all three? 👇

09/08/2026

🦋🌼 TAKE FLIGHT TUESDAY! 🐝✨
Not all pollinator flowers provide the same food!

When we say a plant is “good for pollinators,” it can actually mean several different things. Some flowers provide nectar, some provide pollen, and some provide BOTH! 🌸

🍯 NECTAR SOURCES
Nectar is an important energy source for adult butterflies, bees, moths, hummingbirds and other flower visitors.

Some Florida-friendly natives that are excellent nectar plants include:
🌺 Coral honeysuckle
🌿 Firebush
💜 Blue porterweed
🌸 Seaside ageratum
🌼 Goldenrod
🌱 Button sage

🌾 POLLEN SOURCES
Pollen is especially important to bees and other pollen-collecting insects. It provides protein and other nutrients that nectar alone doesn't provide.

Native plants such as goldenrod, sunflowers, asters and many other daisy-family flowers can be fantastic pollen resources. 🐝

🌸 THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS!
Some plants offer both nectar AND pollen, making them especially valuable in a wildlife garden.

🌼 Goldenrod — nectar + pollen
🌻 Native sunflowers — nectar + pollen
🌸 Asters — nectar + pollen
🌿 Some native salvias — nectar + pollen
🌺 Firebush — primarily valued as a nectar source, while also supporting a variety of other wildlife

And here's another important distinction…

🦋 BUTTERFLY HOST PLANTS ARE A DIFFERENT JOB!

A nectar plant feeds the adult butterfly, but a host plant feeds the caterpillar. 🌿🐛

That's why a truly wildlife-friendly garden should include a mix of:

🍯 Nectar plants
🌾 Pollen plants
🐛 Caterpillar host plants
🦋 And ideally, plants that serve multiple purposes!

For example, native milkweeds can provide nectar for adult butterflies AND serve as host plants for monarch and queen caterpillars. 💚

The goal isn't just to plant a bunch of pretty flowers…

It's to create a garden where pollinators can eat, reproduce, and complete their life cycle. 🐝🦋🐛

🌱 Plant for the whole life cycle, and you'll see a LOT more life in your garden!