SPRING GARDEN TOUR | our Florida suburban backyard oasis (zone 10a) 🌿

Our favorite place to play, gather, & grow…🦋 I hope you enjoy this FULL garden tour of our Central Florida (zone 10a) suburban garden! Here is a full list of what we currently have growing in our space: https://www.allisonbickerstaff.co/lifestyle/hello-from-the-garden

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– Artisan outdoors: https://artisanoutdoors.com

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Let’s create something incredible!💡 Be truly glad…there is wonderful joy ahead. ♡ 1 Peter 1:6

welcome to our garden i’m so excited to give you 
a close look of everything we have blooming and growing this truly is our happy place and such 
a source of inspiration getting to so intimately witness a seed turn into a flower a caterpillar 
into a butterfly i’m just in awe of it all and I never want it to be lost on me so I’m excited to 
show you all of the little intricacies and the different plants that we’ve supported throughout 
the years to really make this space our little garden oasis it feels appropriate to kick things 
off at our fresh cut flower patch when we moved into our home this patch on either side of these 
steps was simply mulch and then I was like what if we just planted flowers there and that was 
one of the best decisions I made because it has provided so much joy to have these zenyas and 
cosmos in bloom this has been our best year of cosmos yet and I think something that was key to 
that was creating our little moat of marolds i call them I call them our marold security guards 
because they help keep the bunnies away we love the bunnies we love to support our bunny friends 
but we also love to have our blooms so they don’t like marolds lots of the maragolds are actually 
key to keeping away mosquitoes as well so highly recommend planting some maragolds in your garden 
and they’re a cheerful beautiful flower as well so I have those alongside the base of our bed and 
then planted a ton of zenia seeds some cosmo seeds and cosmos are really stealing the show i love how 
whimsical and delicate the little petals are and we also have some sunflowers about to bloom as 
well so I love to keep it cheerful and colorful this time of year and what’s so beautiful about 
the zenyas in the cosmos is that they’re cut and come again so once you snip off some blooms in a 
few I don’t even know exactly how long it takes actually maybe like a week or two you’ll have 
a fresh new bloom so that’s just an encouraging thing to continue to cut some cut some blooms 
for your dining table for your friends for your neighbors so that has been so lovely and alongside 
this little flower patch as well we have a potted mint plant i’ve been making mint tea every night 
so this has been amazing and the reason I have this in a pot is because mint is actually a 
runner herb so the roots will actually grow horizontally alongside the soil so I’ve put them 
in our beds a shared bed before but it likes to sort of it doesn’t respect personal space so it 
likes to kind of take over so we have our potted mint and then we have I’m smiling cuz I just saw a 
golf fertility on our Latannia over there and then we have our booilia which is looking so gorgeous 
and then in the corner we have our little water feature this was a DIY we made a few years ago 
i ordered this water feature that’s connected to a solar panel which is also just nestled in the 
flower patch over there and so it’s solar powered and we planted some aloe around it and some other 
succulents i need to sort of clean it out it’s my goal to clean it out every year but I haven’t this 
year yet i’ve been kind of putting it off but it hasn’t been flowing as frequently so we think 
there might be a leak or some sort of blockage so that’s on my list but it’s really lovely to 
have a water feature especially if you are trying to support those pollinators because butterflies 
also need access to some fresh water so that’s a beautiful addition and zenyas are always one of 
my first recommendations when someone is trying to grow flowers in their backyard because they 
are heat tolerant again I love how they’re cut and come again they’re absolutely beautiful and 
the butterflies love them recently we had these brick planter beds installed and they are so 
stunning what’s so fabulous about them too is with our Florida the reality of living in Florida 
is we have a pretty gnarly storm season and these aren’t going anywhere so that’s one beautiful 
aspect besides them being absolutely stunning our friend Joey over at Artisan Outdoors brought this 
vision to life hired a mason and really supported us to make this happen so with these garden beds 
practically they have some drainage at the bottom and then they also have like about half a foot to 
a foot of rocks and then we have a lot a lot of soil and these will evolve season to season they 
are our garden beds so depending on the time of year we’ll have different things growing this 
bed is currently empty still i was sitting on it marinating what I wanted to grow in this bed 
specifically and I’m going to plant some seminal pumpkins that will hopefully be ready around fall 
time and those are a pumpkin variety that’s native to the Florida and southern region so that way 
hopefully they’ll be successful and thrive and then in this bed over here we have our sweet 
potato vine and I love growing sweet potatoes they are one of the most lowmaintenance crop you 
could ever grow in the Florida area or in the south they are a tropical plant so they really 
really love that hot humid climate and what’s so amazing is I just plop a sweet potato in the 
soil i I again I’m not precious about it at all some people will create slips and then plant 
the slips from their sweet potato but I just let it do it all naturally on its own and you 
can see this gorgeous vine that started to grow i probably placed the sweet potato in the soil 
about three weeks ago and the harvest time is quite long so we won’t have sweet potatoes until 
like around Thanksgiving and that just kind of ensures that you get more bang for your buck and 
in the past we’ve had harvests of about 20 sweet potatoes from one organic sweet potato it has 
to be organic and that way it’ll be able to grow on its own so fabulous fabulous starter crop and 
I’ve also heard you can even eat the sweet potato leaves they’re very nutritious or pop them into 
smoothies we haven’t done that yet but it’s on our list coming up and this brick bed is exclusively 
designated for flowers we have some more cosmos that I transplanted from a pot where I started it 
from seed but then I just moved it over to the bed once the plant was more established and then over 
here we have our snapdragon still going strong thankful for that we’ve had this snapdragon for 
three years now and it comes back every season we have a little bit of blank space right here still 
debating what I want to put here and I’m kind of just leaning towards letting the flowers selfseed 
and see what sort of takes over this spot here are blackfoot daisies i love these daisies they’ll 
continue to grow and cascade down over the brick planter bed and that just is a really beautiful 
look sort of like a waterfall of daisies and then we have our moss rose pelane over here which also 
is beautiful i love pelane they do really well in our climate and also come back every year i’m not 
sure how long since this is a new location i’m not sure how long they will stay blooming but we’ll 
see hopefully most of the year we have our salvia a pollinator favorite and then over here we have 
our herb of grace which I am in awe of this herb of grace this is my favorite thing that I found 
at our recent flower festival so let me give you more details about this gem as we continue to 
try to make our backyard more of a sustainable haven and part of the ecosystem finding plants 
like herb of grace feel like such a win because this plant is just naturally thriving because 
it’s native to our area and it’s a host plant for butterflies as well it’s also medicinal so 
you can make teas out of it to help with brain function and all of these other amazing benefits 
so I really personally have just used it for the beauty so far and again I love how it creates 
sort of a waterfall out of our bed and then I also planted herb of grace between the stepping 
stones alongside with this dwarf morning glory and it is starting to trail in between the stones 
so gloriously i love the look of it i’m hoping eventually it’ll just be like very green our pine 
straw will eventually start to deteriorate so I’m hoping the morning glories and the herb of grace 
will take over and create that lush green look between our stepping stones our dwarf morning 
glory has also turned into such a favorite i love how the blooms close in the evening and then 
they pop right back open in the morning hence the name morning glory and I anticipate they’ll be 
able to stay in bloom for most of the year in our climate if not they’ll come back year after year 
with little to no maintenance over in this corner is where I planted our passion fruit so this 
will have those gorgeous stunning passion fruit flowers along with the actual passion fruit which 
if you’ve never had passion fruit highly recommend giving it a try it is nature’s candy truly sour 
candy think of the most delicious sour candy you can think of times 10 that’s how yummy a passion 
fruit is so I’m really excited to hopefully see this vine bear fruit i already started adding 
some support to the vine i’m sure we’ll need to add some reinforcements throughout the years but 
essentially I plan for this to continue to vine up along our fence and I just added the little 
sticky plant clips so far but maybe we’ll add some cattle wire or something we’ll cross that 
bridge when we get to it but really excited to have this as a new addition our brick garden beds 
are still a work in progress since they are so new but for this bed the plan is to have peppers for 
as long as we can hopefully they’ll withstand the Florida heat i’m excited for this fus to continue 
to grow and get bigger because I think the shade the little shade that it’ll add to this bed will 
actually really be helpful so we have jalapeno plant right here a picnic pepper plant right here 
and then we have our herbs we have our basil our parsley our oregano and our rosemary and I have 
my mint over in a pot since it is a runner plant and then I’m just hoping these these herbs will 
be able to coexist okay but we may need to alter the watering cuz they do have slightly different 
watering needs and whatnot so we’ll see again still working through that and then over here 
I planted some Everglades tomato seeds which I love Everglades tomatoes for all of my southern 
gardeners but they I haven’t had much luck with any of them taking the day after I planted them we 
had a ton of rain so they may have drowned in the rain but the plan is to add some sort of tomato 
plant next to our herbs because I love thinking that the herbs will infuse into the tomatoes 
themselves this little section of our garden feels like our little tropical hideaway we have 
our outdoor shower our newly installed outdoor shower which has been lovely it doesn’t have hot 
water just cold water which feels very refreshing after a full day in the garden or just boopping 
around in the Florida sunshine and we have lots of different hibiscus varieties well three different 
hibiscus varieties here to my left we have this stunning variety i’m not sure of the names 
they just have like all these different colors and this one has thrived it is growing quite 
tall i wasn’t expecting that but it has so many blooms and then alongside the shower we have this 
stunning pink mermaid looking hibiscus variety and then we have one in the back corner i still have 
lots of plans for this section it’s ripe with opportunity to grow many more plants especially 
along the shower i feel like that’ll look very nice to just be surrounded by greenery as you’re 
rinsing off and then we do have a little bit of milkweed back here i haven’t focused as much on 
the milkeed this year i love my monarchs forever and always and I always want to have native 
milkeed in our garden but I have focused more on butterfly diversity and trying to gather more 
host plants for the different varieties especially the zebra longwing that’s my dream to have a zebra 
longwing in our garden because that’s actually our Florida butterfly so I’ve never seen them in our 
garden before i saw them recently on a walk in our area so I’m hoping they find they find their way 
here but of course got to have some native milkeed emphasis on the native that just really helps the 
monarch population because they do need to migrate over to Mexico during the winter time so just a 
little tidbit if you want to go down that rabbit hole and here we have our straw flour i have some 
that I picked up from our flower festival this established straw flour and then I have this one 
the Swiss tall variety that we started from seed so really excited for this to hopefully continue 
to grow and strawflower is also cut and come again this little bamboo flower tent was also a new 
addition this year specifically for our son he’s currently a baby so not engaging in it much yet 
but I hope we have many sweet memories under the flower tent i just took some bamboo sticks from 
the hardware store and tried to prop them up as best as I can definitely not an engineer architect 
so we’ll see what happens when the storms roll in but I have some vining plants growing alongside 
it so I’m hoping that will anchor the bamboo a bit more as that continues to grow and then I have 
this pathway of these stepping stones that we made and I planted some cosmos and zenyas alongside 
it and they have taken off they basically have covered the whole pathway but that’s a good 
problem to have right we have all of these zenyas growing so tall i thought about sort of like 
twisting them alongside the bamboo but I think I’ll just leave it as is and just have another 
little bonus cut flower garden section and back here tucked away we have a passionflower potted 
plant and the other day I spotted some golfillery caterpillars on it so that was very exciting 
to see one of the first garden projects that we worked on was our Jasmine crisscross trellis 
which we absolutely love it is due for some training some vine training because our crisscross 
is looking a little muddled it’s very dense and lush right now which again a beautiful problem 
to have so we planted this about 4 years ago and jasmine is such a fast growing vine so you almost 
get instant gratification because it just loves to trail and when it blooms oh my goodness the scent 
back here is beyond heavenly so this has been one of our favorite favorite additions and then we 
also added an arch trellis over the doorway and planted buganilia which the buganilia has never 
looked better it has been blooming so beautifully this year and I think it just needed some time to 
establish at first I was regretting planting it in the ground because I was thinking it probably 
would have more vibrant color if it was in a pot and the soil could dry out more but it proved 
me wrong this year it has been so incredibly happy again it’s been so rewarding to just see 
how things establish and continue to mature and grow and thrive so we love that and then we 
have our Lantana around our lemon tree our Meer lemon tree the the lemon tree was also one of my 
first projects and first things I planted and you would think oh you live in Florida citrus it’s so 
lowmaintenance easy to easy to have thrive since you’re you know in the sunshine state known for 
orange juice and citrus but it is a little more high maintenance and this meer lemon tree has been 
very patient with me i am supposed to fertilize it a lot more i do not so it definitely could thrive 
more so if I was more was more loving and gave it more TLC so that’s on my list to try to add more 
fertilizer and just make sure it’s well taken care of but it does have some lemons growing so 
very very encouraged by that and then behind me something that we also have been inspired to do is 
just sort of limit the grass and make our make our garden as low maintenance as possible i’m showing 
you all of these flowers and blooms and plants and you might be thinking “Wow this is a lot of work.” 
And in some ways I guess it is but it truly is such an enjoyment that it doesn’t feel like work 
but also we’re trying to just create the more native plants you have the less work it is because 
mother nature does all the work so we’ve been eliminating more and more of our grass and now we 
don’t have it sprayed or any sort of fertilizer or chemicals on it cuz that’s just something that’s 
important to us so right here we actually have perennial peanuts growing along the pine straw and 
they’re doing okay i’m actually inspired to try to propagate our herb of grace and grow that along 
the perennial peanuts so maybe we’ll have some of the perennial peanuts with some of the herb herb 
of grace and through the years I anticipate us just having more and more ground cover and less 
and less grass especially the non-native Zoya grass which is what we currently have i really 
truly feel like I’ve been talking your ear off and I feel like I have so much more to say but our 
garden tour is coming to a close and I’m standing in front of our stunning elderberry shrub which 
is the gift that keeps on giving we planted this elderberry shrub a year and a half ago a year ago 
it was a gift from one of our favorite vendors at the farmers market they were so kind to pull out 
a sprout of their elderberry and give it to us and it has grown exponentially again a native plant 
so it’s thriving and it’s such a source of beauty but then it also produces those beautiful dainty 
elder flowers which you can use in cooking for medicinal immune boosting qualities and multiple 
times a year it also will produce berries so the elderberry maybe you’ve heard of elderberry syrup 
or elderberry gummies and those are also immune boosting and absolutely delicious you have to 
cook them ahead of time but if you make some elderberry jam or some syrup or some gummies it 
is so so delicious and now it’s another source of life because we have our cardinal couple who 
have made their home here and again I’m still just beaming about that and really hopeful that 
we’ll get to see the bird learn how to fly soon but we love our elderberry and then alongside 
our fences we also have Christmas palm trees which some of them are looking a little sad but 
we do love our palm trees it seems like again the essence of Florida we have a little bit of cottage 
feel coastal feel a little bit of everything we also have a plumeriia back there which is so 
lovely smells amazing the flowers are gorgeous and over here we have our Indian malo plant which 
is a native species it creates so many of these little seed pockets they’re so cute and the birds 
love them so again I could go on and on i think it’s clear to see how much I love this space 
and how thankful I am to have this be a part of our home and I’m excited and thankful to continue 
to tend to it but thank you so much for watching i really hope you enjoyed this video and have 
a beautiful rest of your spring season bye