It's hot here!

Hi, all - I'm in Zone 10b, south Florida. I moved here five years ago to help out my sister who's in bad health and landscaping her front yard has been my garden. Her backyard is the pool and patio, solid pavers. I've created a large bromeliad collection/living bouquet/patch as the centerpiece under and around one of her two enormous old live oaks. I'm accustomed to summer gardening but the heat stops it all. I can get out and do one task and then I'm finished. And this after living in Arizona for nine years and swearing I'd never live in this kind of heat again - well, of course the Universe sent me back.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire! 🔥😂 I've never been to Florida, how does it compare to Arizona? We've been hitting about 108F here by day, but at least I can garden at night when it's a cool 80F. From my time on the East coast I remember the nights don't cool down nearly so much with all the humidity trapping that heat.

I'd love to see your bromeliad patch! I have no experience with them, but they look so interesting 😃

The solid humidity in the summer is a big difference. In Arizona it was so hot I thought the notion of dry heat was laughable but here the heat index rises substantially because of humidity. Today the temperature will rise to 92, which we thought was a cool front in Arizona, but the added humidity will make 92 feel like 110! And, as in AZ, it does not cool down much at night, high 70s, low 80s, with another similarity that you don't go out during the day if you don't have to. It's an air conditioning world.

I will try to take a good picture of my bromeliad patch and post it. It's very pretty, even if primarily foliage. This is a land of epiphytes, air plants, with not much of a root system and receiving their moisture from the air, when there is no rain. Some of them live in trees but they are not parasitic. Orchids are air plants as are bromeliads, which have a 'cup' in their leaf formation that will hold rainwater. I've just started putting a couple of orchids in the trees to see what happens.

In many ways the two locations resemble one another, mainly due to palm trees. You are in Tucson where more people use native plants to garden. Is that what you're doing?

I lived in south Florida back in the 80s. I've been in Tucson since the 90s. The difference between the two climates is an excellent illustration of the heat index. The moment you walk out the door of an air conditioned store in Florida to a hot parking lot, and you take a breath and think you're going to die - that experience is unique to the high humidity environment. We don't get that in Tucson. But both are climates where you have to respect the conditions, which generally means staying inside in the daytime. I do my shopping and errands early.

In my relatively new garden, I have tried to stick to drought-tolerant native plants. This is largely to ensure that I'm able to avoid using any municipal water in the garden. I have an active/passive rainwater harvesting system that I started three years ago. This year is the real test, as I more than doubled the number of plants last fall. So far I have been lucky and have never had the tanks run dry. This is supposed to be a wet summer, so I should be OK.

I lived in Tucson for 4 years, getting a masters at the university and, after having lived in Goodyear, AZ (West of Phoenix) for five years, it was obvious there was more of an attempt to use xeriscape in Tucson than in Phoenix area. I had a volunteer Palo Verde that sprung up in my apartment's patio and I cultivated it and trimmed it, dodging the gigantic thorns, while it grew into a full tree that threw a little shade on that area. Other than that, everything else was container gardening and nursing the lovely pomegranate tree outside my big front window as it braved the dry heat. My apartment in Tucson used a swamp cooler! It was great. In Goodyear, forget it. The humidity that's built up in the west valley has cancelled out any hope of swamp coolers working.

I found that air conditioning in Arizona sort of permeated the first layer of your skin, so after a day inside in the coolness it took a while for the massive heat to sink in. Of course, all it took was getting in a parked car to destroy all remaining coolness. And you're right, in Florida when I walk outside in the morning the heat and humidity smacks me right in the face and there is no 'grace' period from the air conditioned house. The gardening here is pretty much what works in the tropical ecology. So, the jungle is destroyed to build on the land and then it's replanted from nursery cultivated jungle plants.

What plants are you using?

Desert willows, a Joan Leonetti oak, an Arizona cypress are my trees. I've got some brittlebush, hop bush, San Marco hibiscus, Texas ranger, jojoba, creosote, bee bush, baja fairy duster, and a bunch of globe mallows. Most of these have flowers. Then some red yucca and a little miss sunshine, prickly pears, barrels and a ocotillo.