“This is my paradise,” smiles Mabel Overby who with her husband Lonnie has been creating a garden that looks like the Yard of the Month on a daily basis in St. Mark’s Woods. Lonnie attends to the lawn care, and Mabel touches his green landscape with vibrant colors. Perennial beds border the house, line the perimeter of the property, and spiral in the center of the front yard.

Summer color comes from an orchestration of old–fashioned flowers on a diet of mushroom compost, water, and love: amaryllis, black–eyed Susan, canna, daisy, dahlia, four o’clocks, hibiscus, lantana, phlox, and tithonia. Heavy blooming crepe myrtles and althea are repeated across the near acre of a lot. Mabel calls althea the grandparent’s tree from memories of childhood. She loves the flowers and that althea grows where nothing else will.

Daturas are her bell flowers in the symphony of color. She tempers the bright color with green punctuator plants like cutleaf philodendron, fatsia, hosta, agave, elephant ears, and banana trees. Sometimes she even grows vegetables among the flowers. This year tomatoes grow between the dahlias. “You have to integrate things,” remarks Mabel.

Fuschia flowers of hibiscus, dahlia, and amaryllis combine to make a symphony of color. Several distinctive tropical plants grow exceedingly well on her property: the rice paper plant and the trailing abutilon. The rice paper plant, Tetrapanax papyriferus, is a native of Southern China and Taiwan. Pith from the stem is used to make rice paper in the orient. Abutilon is often called flowering maple and is related to hibiscus.

Where does she get her plants? “I use ‘takeover stuff.’ People share with me and I share with them.”

The Overbys maintain both summer and winter vegetable gardens. Beans, okra, peas, peppers, and tomatoes are currently shared with deer.

Black–eyed susan bed is mixed with elephant ears. Starting early in the morning, they spend two to three hours a day working in the garden. Mabel remarks, “I used to be a workaholic, but now I just get pleasure in doing my yard.”Cypress and cedar mulch are used around all beds. They have an irrigation system on a timer, but the Overbys and their plants much prefer the rainwater.
Lonnie Overby maintains the lawn.
Althea are Mabel Overby’s ‘grandparent’s tree’ from childhood.
Mabel Overby deadheads her ‘bel tree’ datura.
Banana plantation