Marco Calusa Garden Club Visits Pepper Ranch Preserve

Calusa Garden Club members enjoyed their September Gadabouts outing on Friday, October 10, with a visit to Pepper Ranch Preserve. The 2,700-acre Pepper Ranch Preserve is owned by Conservation Collier, and its staff members presented a sunflower viewing by posting guides along the roads in the preserve that took visitors to the fields most loaded with native Southeastern sunflowers.

The eight club members who attended were enchanted not only by the sea of yellow in the fields but also by the wildlife and farm animals that were on display at the ranch. Conservation Collier leases the ranch fields in the 2,700-acre preserve to farmers who raise cattle, and the cattle were out in abundance, along with their cattle egrets and a few sandhill cranes.

The Pepper Ranch Preserve wild sunflowers are known as the prairie sunflower, which are smaller than the tall flower we normally think of when hearing the word “sunflower.” The prairie sunflower bloom is smaller, and its center is small compared to the large disc of sunflower seeds we are used to seeing. They grow in the flooded grasslands throughout Florida and can grow up to six feet tall, with as many as 15 blooms per stem. The entire Pepper Ranch Preserve is full of fields of native plants that were naturally seeded from flowers growing in the previous years, wind, birds, and animals.

The October 10 Gadabouts trip also included lunch at Lazzano’s Mexican Restaurant in Immokalee, then a visit to Sanctuary Nursery. There, the group enjoyed one of their favorite pursuits - buying plants. Members purchased plants for their own gardens, for their donations to the November 22 Plant and Floral Design Sale and Family Fall Festival, and for planting at the Leigh Plummer Park Garden.