Land of Flowers

By Amanda Hagood

They started off as decorations.

When Michael Polen began working at Art Stone Co., the concrete statuary shop his family founded in 1959, he decided to spruce up some of the items on the lot with a few plants. The pretty orchids he and his wife Paula picked up on their regular trips to Keys seemed like just the thing.

“I thought it would get people interested in the fountains,” he recalls with a laugh. “But all they wanted was the orchids!”

That was 1982. Today, you can still wander past mermaids, gnomes, and other fantastical creatures cast in stone, but if you keep going toward the back of the lot, you’ll find a living, breathing marvel: a veritable jungle of orchids.

Cyrtopodium Maxillaria Phalaenopsis. With names as varied and as mesmerizing as their bold shapes and colors, orchids represent one of the largest plant families in the world. Endlessly adaptive, diverse species grow in trees, on cliff faces, among prairie grasses, or nestled into fungi communities of the forest floor.

With our humid subtropical cli- mate, Florida is particularly rich in orchids – and orchid growers. Bill Nunez, a longtime leader of the Florida West Coast Orchid Society

(FWCOS), can remember hunting for orchids as a young man in DeSoto County.

Trash at Clam Bayou

At least ever other day I walk or ride my bike through Clam Bayou. I have never seen it clean of trash in the water or on the shorelines of the water areas. (Read this article at thegabber.com for photos). This bayou is an important ecologically sensitive flood control area that needs a lot of work to make it a healthy environment. Please contact the Gulfport Parks Department and encourage a clean up effort. –Hal Wahlborg, Gulfport

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