A couple of weeks ago when Elise and I got back from our stint in Gulf Shores, Ala., working at Gulf State Park, I started to notice the first blush of spring color here in southwest Mississippi — an occasional parsley hawthorne in a fenceline here or a stray azalea blossom there. Portents of what is to become a riot of color in the next few weeks.
Gulf Shores is in USDA Plant Hardiness Zone 9a, while McComb is in Zone 8b, meaning that Gulf Shores’ lowest winter temperatures are, on average, about 5-10 degrees warmer than McComb’s. That means more plants might be expected to do better through the winter there than here and bloom earlier.
But this year there have been a couple of really cold snaps on the Coast, so its earliest spring blossoms are not that much ahead of ours.
One of the benefits of working with the groundskeepers at Gulf State Park as I did is that I got to play in their greenhouse where they overwinter their plants and sprout new landscaping plants for the spring. Although coastal Alabama is not much ahead of us outdoors, their greenhouse was already an explosion of colors by the time we left.
They had blueberry trees already blooming white and pink, bright violet Porterweed (one of their favorites), huge bottlebrush trees, red tropical sage, fluorescent red pentas, and hardy rosemary with its delicate white and purple flowers. There were pink begonias, orange shrimp plants, and pink and orange bougainvilleas.
Under all of that, little yellow oxalis plants with their squarish petals were peeking out from the gravel lining the floor.
Green is a color, too, and they have numerous shades, including succulent houseleeks, olive longleaf pines, bright green rabbit foot ferns with their bizarre-looking above-ground roots, a forest of 3-foot tall althea trees, persimmon trees for the deer, and hundreds upon hundreds of zinnia sets.
They even have a pineapple plant coming into fruit.
So, if you happen to be on a vacation on the Emerald Coast during the spring, you ought to drive around Gulf State Park because I bet it’s going to be outstanding when they set all this vegetation out of the greenhouse and into their beds and gardens.
