Notes from the land · July 2026

Clearing the First Growing Yard

Colored-pencil sketch of a tall slash pine with rows of container plants growing in its shade — The shape of the first yard. The pine keeps its canopy, and the containers line up in the shade underneath it.

The first growing yard at Wardwells is not going to be a cleared field. It is a stand of slash pines (Pinus elliottii), and the plan is to take the scrub out from underneath instead of leveling anything.

That is on purpose.

What the Pines Do

A typical wholesale yard grows in full sun and stretches shade cloth over anything that can't take it. We already have shade. Forty feet of it. The pines thin the Florida sun down to exactly what an understory plant wants, and they do it for free.

So the clearing will be selective. Vines and scrub come out. Every healthy pine stays.

What Grows Underneath

What goes underneath is the list this nursery was built around. Coontie (Zamia integrifolia) holds its deep green in bright shade, where full sun would bleach it. Needle palm (Rhapidophyllum hystrix) has spent its whole existence as an understory plant, so a pine yard is simply home. Walter's viburnum (Viburnum obovatum) takes the in-between light and still fills in dense enough to shear.

Why It Matters in a Yard

There is a simpler reason too. Around Jacksonville, the yards these plants are headed for look a lot like this one. Pines first, plantings second. A plant raised under canopy goes into that yard already used to the light, the needle fall, and the root competition.

Grow the plant in the conditions it will live in, and it never notices the move.