As I drive around Tallahassee these days, I see fields of color. It might be the light purple of lyreleaf sage, or the deeper purple-pink of the non-native henbit deadnettle. Maybe I see white: clover, or small clusters of crowpoison. I’m guessing you may also have noticed lawns starting to get tall and colorful, and have likely seen bees and butterflies for the first time in months. It’s a good time of year to sit back and let our lawns feed these early-flying pollinators. All you have to do is… nothing.
Welcome to the (sort of) first episode of WFSU’s new ecology podcast, Coast to Canopy. I say sort of because, right now, this is an extended edition of the first Coast to Canopy segment on WFSU-FM’s Speaking Of program (first aired on March 13, 2025). We are in the process of setting it up as a podcast, but, for now, consider this a preview.
As I do with my video segments, I’ve prepared this written post with plenty of photos to illustrate what we’re talking about. The format is a little different on a podcast post, consisting of curated excerpts from the transcript. My notes will show up in italics.
Meet the Guests
In 1980, Donna Legare started Native Nurseries of Tallahassee with her husband, Jody Walthall. They handed ownership of the nursery to a team of former employees a few years ago, but you might still see them helping out.
Mark Tancig is the Horticulture Extension Agent for the University of Florida/ IFAS Leon County Extension. He’s no stranger to the WFSU Ecology Blog, having appeared in videos about bee habitat, native soils, mistletoe, and more.
Regan McCarthy joined me as a cohost. Regan is WFSU’s Assistant News Director, and a lover of bees and plants.
Let’s jump right in:
Why No Mow March in Florida? Why not May?
Mark Tancig: It came from an extension client who sent me the No Mow May newspaper article from the New York Times. These beautiful pictures. And [they] said, “hey, how about we try something like this in Tallahassee?”
And so I got with some of these other extension agents, we kind of chatted about it, and No Mow May, first of all, [would] be a little intense as far as the biomass plants grow in May in Florida. It’s a little bit different than Wisconsin, I think, where I got the original article. And so, March seemed more doable.
The other thing about why we do it in March is that’s when our pollinators are kind of coming out of their little winter slumber, and they’re looking for food. And oftentimes, it’s those weeds mixed in our lawn that are going to really help them get some resources as they’re kind of coming out of their winter sleepiness.
Regan McCarthy: So, No Mow May, that’s something that happens around the country? And we’re thinking March just makes more sense here in North Florida?
Mark Tancig: So, No Mow May is an effort that I’ve seen, I think it was in Wisconsin that they promoted it. And I think a couple other folks up north, it was No Mow May. Remember, in March there’s still snow on the ground in some of these places.
What Blooms on our Florida Lawns in March?
Mark Tancig: You do get all these like great, mostly winter annuals. Most folks would call them weeds. But, the idea is to get them to think of these things as wildflowers and resources instead.
Donna Legare: I think what we’ll expect are lyreleaf sage, little bluets. It’s the little white wildflower that’s almost right on the ground. Some little yellow clovers, blue eyed grass. So those are some of the ones that we’ll see, but they’re not quite up yet.
Mark Tancig: One that started to get me to leave chunks of the yard unmowed was our violets. So we had these violets coming up and they’re really abundant.
Right now there’s a lot of vetch… Not all the vetch species are going to be native, but they’re not considered an invasive species. They’re in our disturbed areas, but they’re really important for bees.
You have your Carolina geranium… that’s a native species often considered just kind of a weed in the lawn. But it’s a native that’s blooming this time of year. Really good for the pollinators.
When Can We Mow Again?
Donna Legare: I’d watch for the seed I think because it could vary from yard to yard.
Donna lets flowers go to seed before mowing to allow them to reproduce and spread. If you didn’t want certain species to spread, you could mow them before they made seed. Seeds also feed mammals and birds.
Mark Tancig: It kind of depends on how tolerant you are.
People have their own ideas of what they’re willing to deal with aesthetic-wise in their landscape. And some folks are okay with having a little craziness. In that case, go all the way to No Mow May if you want to, but otherwise, after March, a lot of our other landscape plants, a lot of other native species just out in the landscape are up and they’re blooming and they’re flowering.
And so then these pollinators have a chance to go find resources and other places. It’s that little window where most things are still dormant, where we have these winter annuals kind of finishing off where they could help out the pollinators a little bit.
The Year’s First Bees Need Leaves and Bare Patches
Mark Tancig: We have a lot of native solitary bees that are ground nesting. And so they need that little patches here and there. We don’t want too much bare ground to cause erosion. But, you know, little patchy places, little thin grass, you know, are perfect for them to do their little burrows.
Mark was an interviewee on our guide to creating habitat for bees in the yard. After all, bees can’t visit your flowers if they don’t have places to raise their young.
Mining Bees (Andrenidae)
Donna Legare: When I’m on my walk, just yesterday I passed a house where all along the roadside corner were all these little piles made by the little miner bees. And if they were to mow that, they’d be smashing it down.
Regan McCarthy: Oh, what are the miner bees collecting? Tell me more about that.
Donna Legare: Well, the miner bees are little pollinators that come up out of the ground. They’re, what would you call them? Single?
Rob Diaz de Villegas: They’re solitary nesters.
Donna Legare: That’s the word I was looking for… they nest in a colony even though they’re solitary nesters.
But not like a yellow jacket nest where you’d have thousands and thousands. And so [mining bees] are relatively, well, they’re very docile. You can get up right close to them and watch them and, not be worried about them. And, but the problem is that when people see them in their yards and they see these little bees, sometimes the males will get up over the colony and they’ll buzz around like this, you know, looking for females to mate with. People get alarmed, and then they call the exterminator, or they’ll do something to get rid of them, poison them.
Though they nest close together, each nest belongs to a single bee. The bees don’t live in an organized social structure like honeybees or yellowjackets. Social bees and wasps are more likely to be aggressive to humans, while solitary nesters would risk their ability to collect pollen by attacking a much larger animal.
Blueberry digger bee
I also have photos of blueberry diggers on actual blueberry flowers. These bees have evolved to get as much pollen as possible from a blueberry flower, using the vibrations of their wing muscles. Their life cycle is timed to blueberry blooms, but they will seek nectar from other flowers in bloom in February and March.
Donna Legare: I wanted to put a plug in for the Southeastern blueberry bee.
What’s interesting about that bee is that it looks like a little bumble bee, but it’s much faster, and it’s only out during the season that blueberry plants bloom. That would be sparkleberries, huckleberries, all the different blueberries.
Now, it’ll go on other plants that are out at that time. So you’ll have it on a redbud, and on other plants. But, you know, I love having blueberry bushes. And without this blueberry bee – there’s a few other pollinators that will use it, but it’s a primary pollinator. You just wouldn’t have the blueberry crop that we have.
Mark Tancig: Another example of one that spends most of its time, most of its life is just hanging out in the soil. And so again, with these other products (pesticides and herbicides) that we might be using can affect these kinds of species.
Pesticide Use
Donna Legare: And I think also one of the most important things is to use very little in the way of, pesticides, both herbicides and insecticides.
They’re way overused, at least in my neighborhood. And, I think it affects my yard as well. It’s coming down from uphill. But we’re trying to increase the diversity of insects in our yard.
Mark Tancig: And with the pesticides, a lot of folks don’t realize that, they might want to get the sod webworms out of their yard. They might want to deal with some lawn pest. But a lot of our pesticides that we use on those insects are not specific to those pests.
[The pesticides] knock out a lot of things and a lot of things that are just causing no harm and just living in the soil as larvae. So those digger bees we talked about at the beginning, firefly larvae, there’s all kinds of larvae that are just hanging out doing no harm. And when we apply these products. We need to start thinking that it’s not just the pest that I’m concerned about that these are harming, but it’s a whole lot of other insects as well.
Pollinators of a North Florida Backyard
WFSU Ecology Producer Rob Diaz de Villegas has extensively photographed insects in his yard and other north Florida locales. The following pages include the most common species you might see in your yard, which is a surprisingly diverse lot, as well as a few rare or specialized forest species.
Rewilding: Not Everything that Grows is Beneficial
I shifted gears here towards rewilding. You may have a patch or patches of your yard that you would like to be a habitat beyond March. If you left those patches alone, you’d likely get a lot of native plants, but potentially a lot of nonnative and aggressively invasive species as well. How can you tell which is which?
Mark Tancig: You can use things like iNaturalist or Seek, these little apps that help you identify plants. You can contact your local extension office and we’ll help you ID things. But just I would say look and see what that natural areas actually supposed to look like.
Mark mentioned iNaturalist here. I wrote a blog post about using iNaturalist and other tools to identify weeds and learn whether they’re native or not.
Donna Legare: You can do that by going to the extension office. You can come to Native Nurseries with a cutting and have somebody on the staff identify it, because I think we know pretty much all those invasives. And so you want to work on getting rid of those.
Just by stopping mowing, certain things will move in, like [Rob] had American Beautyberries move in.
You can buy American Beautyberry, but usually the birds will plant it for you. And pokeweed. I think that’s a great plant. You never be able to buy one because it’s a dime a dozen, but a bird will plant it. And so just by not mowing underneath your trees, you’ve made a seed bed where things are going to come in.
Using Your Mower to Replicate Fire
Donna Legare: The problem you run into is that, when you’re only mowing once a year, you’ll get trees: native and non-native, and the trees would shade it out eventually and shade out the wildflowers. So if you want it, sometimes we have to go in and dig out some of the trees.
But the worst thing we’ve had are invasive vines, like skunk vine that moves through the grass and can actually get into a bed like that. So there’s there’s work involved when you when you make a natural area, you have to watch for the invasive plants.
Mark Tancig: We see them as wild spaces, but to keep those biodiversity benefits there for all these good creatures, you do have to do some maintenance. You can’t just let it go and expect it to be wild because Florida’s natural ecosystems, there was things that kept those in check, mostly fire.
We’re not all going to be burning our landscapes because it’s not always very safe. But what we can do is get in there and somehow mimic a fire. So, like Donna said, if you leave it too long, trees, shrubs, they’re going to come in. They’ll start shading things out. Pine trees have come in my areas pretty thick.
And so you do have to go in there and and thin them out and maybe mow it down once a year or twice a year… keep it a little bit in check because otherwise it it just goes wild. You get invasive plants come in and then you wonder, “should we have just kept mowing this?”
Observing and Imitating Natural Areas Near You
Mark Tancig: I would say one of the things you can do is go to a natural area near you. Not necessarily a local park, but go to the forest and see what these areas… what they look like when natural functions happen. So fire, native species… look and see what that looks like and go back and say, okay, this is what I’m going to try to do in my area.
There might be little pieces within your neighborhood that maybe have a little piece of that naturalness left. And so that can help you get an idea. I lived in Levy Park for a while, and it was pretty built out, but there was, right around Ruediger [Elementary], there’s a little patch of what used to be, right? So there’s some big short leaf pine, there’s some big hickories, mockernut hickories out there. That gives you an idea, like a red oak/ hickory woods type of an idea (learn more about this ecosystem below).
I would say visit some of the greenways, learn some of the plants out there and then see what’s coming up. Going to walk around the neighborhood, see what’s popping up in the places that are left alone a little bit to try to get a little hint of what might have been there.
So if you see magnolias and beech trees, maybe you’re more in like a woodland situation. If you’re close to a stream, you’re going to be more in a little beech/ magnolia forest where, if you’re up at the top of the hill, it probably would have been, you know, pine, open forest there.
A Quick and Dirty (Soily?) Guide to North Florida Ecosystems
Mark said to go to a nearby wild space to observe habitat. He mentioned a wooded lot near his house, and greenways. Some of you may live close to the Apalachicola National Forest, or where hills dip down towards creeks or ravines. The following are some of the basic habitat types you may encounter in and around Tallahassee. Of course, we live in a biodiverse area with many specialized habitats and ecosystem variations, which can make the process of getting out and observing both challenging and surprisingly rewarding. The following are the most common.
Longleaf pine/ wiregrass ecosystems
Longleaf pine/ wiregrass ecosystems are the dominant upland habitat of the American southeast. What do I mean by upland? Ecosystems that grow on higher ground are drier than low-lying areas, where water collects. They are higher and drier, and Florida is the lightning capital of the world. The plants best suited to these conditions are those that thrive with frequent fire. When Mark and Donna talk about using a lawnmower to mimic natural fire, they’re talking about an almost yearly process where fire kills back vegetation, and it then grows back vigorously.
You’ll notice the header says longleaf/ wiregrass ecosystems, and not a singular ecosystem. There are many variations based on soils and topography. The images above are from the Munson Sandhills. Here, the soils are pure sand, and water drains quickly. Many of the understory plants are adapted to dry conditions, plants such as lupines, yuccas, and prickly pears.
The Munson Sandhills are south of Tallahassee. In town and to the north, clay mixes into the sandy soils. Longleaf habitats in Thomasville, for instance, grow in Orangeburg sandy loams. This iconic soil of the Red Hills region is a mix of sand and red clay. So, while longleaf habitats in Thomasville will have many plants in common with the Munson Sandhills, they will also have different plants that are better suited to soils that hold more moisture.
Shortleaf Pine/ Oak/ Hickory Woodlands
In his answer about observing wild patches in your neighborhood, Mark mentioned some specific tree species: shortleaf pine, mockernut hickory, and red oak. Research conducted over the last few decades shows that woodlands featuring these trees would have been the main habitat of the Tallahassee Hills region. They were likely intermixed with longleaf savannas, and so your Tallahassee home may have been in one or the other, or an ecotone transitioning between the two.
In many ways, a shortleaf/ oak/ hickory woodland functions like a longleaf ecosystem, with different fire-resistant trees in the canopy. Bluestems replace wireless as the dominant grass in the understory, and ecosystem would have burned every year or two.
It’s an uncommon ecosystem type, with other locations in Arkansas, and to a lesser degree in the Piedmont. We’ll learn a lot more about it in an upcoming WFSU Ecology segment.
Beech/ Magnolia Forest/ Upland Hardwood Forest
When we think of Tallahassee’s urban canopy, we think of live oaks and southern magnolias, and it’s hard not to notice all of the native plum and cherry trees in bloom right now. They’re on lawns across town, regardless of whether you live higher or lower on a hill. The story of how these trees left our low, wet areas and climbed uphill is tied in with the story of our shortleaf habitats, so stay tuned to the blog for more on that.
My point is that other lawns in your neighborhood may not be the best guide of what habitat had been where your home is now. Beech/ Magnolia forests are common in the north side of town, in ravines and the slopes around creeks and rivers. If you live in this part of town, you have plenty of examples an upland hardwood forest: Elinor Klapp-Phipps Park, Timberlane Ravine Trail, AJ Henry Park, and the Overstreet Trail at Maclay Gardens State Park.
As Donna says in the interview, rewilding in this setting is much different than in a longleaf or shortleaf habitat. It’s more of a closed canopy, and less sunlight reaches the ground. As a result, there are far fewer wildflower species that grow here. There are some neat plants here, though. Here is where you’ll find violets, partridgeberry, sarsaparilla vine, and if you’re lucky, spring ephemerals such as trilliums and jack-in-the-pulpit. And wouldn’t be cool to have a plant called hearts-a-bustin’ in your yard?
Rewilding and No Mowing: How Crazy Do You Want To Go?
Some of us would love nothing more than to fully restore a native ecosystem in our yards, while others prefer tidy turf grass and ornamentals that do not attract insects. Most of us are somewhere in between, I imagine. We all have to decide how much or how little we’re comfortable doing.
It can be a lot of work to maintain a wild space, though. We spend time pulling invasives, and bringing home native plants from the nursery to enhance the habitat. It would be nice (and much cheaper) if every forest plant was represented in the urban seed bank.
How you feel about your yard habitat might change once you’ve started. If you’re like me, you might fall in love with the many different bees, butterflies, and other insects that feed on flowers (and each other) in your outdoor space. You might also find that it’s more work than you have time for.
Are you a rewilder? What has your experience been?
