Since setting up at the new Paco Command Center in Southport, NC, we've been extremely busy putting in plants. The property has a thirty or forty yard strip of nothing on our side of a ridge of holly trees that runs along the back property line from east to west, and a similar swath of nothing running from the NE corner south to the street in front of the house. The respective strips are covered in pine straw, and vary from 7 feet to 12 feet wide. So, we're trying to fill up that space, although it may take a couple of years to do it. The upside is that it's all a kind of canvas on which we can create our own botanical vision. While I would have been delighted to fill up the space with various noxious shrubs and carnivorous plants, Mrs. Paco wisely insisted on more orthodox specimens, chosen for beauty and/or usefulness. We've planted blueberry bushes, a raspberry bush, gardenias, cannas of various striking colors, Arizona blanket flowers (which we were fortunate to discover on a nearby vacant lot), day lilies, zinnias, knockout roses, irises and many more species, too numerous to list all at once. Here are a few items that I find particularly pleasing.
Hardy white hibiscus. We brought some of these back from northern Virginia, and they are thriving in this heat.
I don't know that I've ever seen such intensely blue flowers as the ones on this blue delphinium butterfly plant.
We have a couple of stands of Texas star (also known as swamp hibiscus) which we grew from seeds collected from the ones we had back in Fairfax.