Everyone who immigrates to the barrier islands arrives on the wings of a dream. The source of the dream for each may vary, but the dream itself is always the same: "I am going to live on a tropical island." Mine was born on childhood vacations in the mid 1940's -- living for a month each summer in sugary sands, salty water, and an old wooden cottage.

The rest of the dream was supplied by Hollywood at Saturday matinees, in living color on the silver screen. It came in various versions, but none differed greatly from this:

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A wounded Corsair fighter plane flies low over the blue Pacific, the engine sputtering and dragging a trail of smoke. The radio is shattered and the carrier is beyond the horizon. With a large island nearby on his port side, the pilot miraculously ditches the plane and escapes before it sinks to the bottom. He tears off his uniform and boots and swims to the shore.

His footprints seem to be the first ever made in the broad, sandy beach as he makes his way to a line of tall, leaning Coconut palms and into a verdant jungle of exotic plants with huge flowers and giant leaves full of holes or brightly colored patterns. He soon comes to a clearing, and finds a hut perched on pilings. It has a roof thatched of fronds and no windows or doors to separate the inside from the outside.

Near the hut there is a depression in the sand full of glowing coals. There, roasting a whole suckling pig on a wooden spit is a lovely girl in a sarong with a necklace of pink flowers and a large Cattleya orchid over one ear.

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When, after wandering the planet in search of an education and career, I made my way back to the islands of my childhood vacations to settle down, the dream was still with me. My wife and I, both lifelong artists, designers, and gardeners, eagerly attacked our at-that-time typical island yard of mown weeds and sandspurs to craft our own super-tropical paradise.

For one of our birthdays, we splurged on a copy of "Tropica" with its 7,000 color photographs of exotic plants from around the world. Nurseries and garden centers were abundant and eager to bring in as many of those plants as could grow here long enough to convince us that the suffering and demise predestined by nature for so many of them was our fault and not theirs.

With the help of Miracle-Gro, Blossom-Booster, liquid iron, and countless bags of 6-6-6, not to mention malathion, Dursban, Weed-n-Feed, and enormous volumes of cheap water, our success was legend. People down the street from us had to allot an extra 5 minutes for their walk to the beach, so they could stop and gawk at our glorious yard.

Then, one summer, an otherwise every-day event planted in my brain the seed of a different outlook on landscaping and life on these barrier islands:

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We walked to the beach for our regular late afternoon swim. The water was bright aquamarine with bands of darker green and purple beyond the shore. Huge cumulus clouds entertained those who looked up from the beach or down from a passing plane. A large storm cloud connected to the sea with dark rain bands and flashes of lightning crossed the horizon at a safe distance. It was one of those times when you could walk out of August's envelope of warm, humid air straight into the water without flinching, and neck-deep, you could still count your toes.

You don't swim in that water, you just lean back into it and loll; and lolling that afternoon, I gazed back at the beach that was spotlit by the late day sun. Capping the dune of sugar white sand was a dense bed of Sea oats laden with golden seed culms that yielded to each passing breeze. Dotting the scene were scattered mounds of wild flowers like the yellow Dune sunflower, pink Shore-purslane, and white Searocket. Railroad vines raced seaward across the sand carrying their passengers, random clusters of large purple blossoms. A line of Cabbage palms with fully fronded beards and interspersed with Seagrapes provided a glowing backdrop that threw all the houses and yards behind them into a deep shadow.

It was a perfect moment. It was without a single exception to diminish the experience. It was an actual and visible instance of the essence of this island that was the core of my long-standing devotion to it. This, I grasped, is the island that I have always loved -- the one featured in my memories when I was not here. This is this island's real "self". The rest of the island, with its yard-man landscapes is something and somewhere else entirely.

We finished our swim and headed back to the house along the sandy path through the Sea oats and across the shallow swale to the end of our street. The sunlight that crossed above that line of Cabbage palms could now be seen falling squarely onto our personal landscape -- our tropical paradise; but this time the sight of it was not as rewarding as it should have been. It was instead jolting.

"That's downright disgusting", I said to my wife, "our landscape is way too green -- too lush! It seems somehow alien." It was not a critique per se of the landscape. That was as perfect and wonderful as ever. It was instead, the juxtaposition of our creation next to that "essence of this island" I had just experienced. It was like I had departed the beach by plane and landed at my yard on some other continent. It was suddenly so clear that this landscape could never be experienced as an integral part of this island. It would never be more than a superficial decoration that we had artificially applied onto it simply for the sake of our own amusement.

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I did not then immediately grasp what to do about this newfound conflict in my values. Nor did it occur to me that much could be done at all to resolve this problem that was not exclusive to our yard. After all, most of the island, save for the beaches, was already covered with a patchwork quilt of decorative yard-works. So, the event was at first just thought provoking.

Not too long thereafter, however, it proved to be quite timely. Prolonged droughts, rising populations, and lethargic bureaucracies collided in a grand crisis over the supply of water. Regulations reduced usage and it became increasingly difficult to hold onto lushness beyond the filtered light of high shade. Change then became an imperative, and in turn, an opportunity to test the thoughts provoked by that earlier event.

I drew lines on the lawn around the shadows of trees and clusters of shrubbery. They undulated naturally and defined spaces that connected into broad pathways around the house. Everything growing in those spaces was transplanted or discarded. The void was then covered with 4 inches of white sand with random drifts of half-inch washed shell along the edges. All hard edges and straight lines were deleted or mitigated. A little shell on either side of a sidewalk that could not be removed made it seem to disappear and allowed the adjacent groundcovers to grow natural edges that seldom required clipping.

The change was so small; the result was so radical. Reduction of the irrigation required was significant but overshadowed by the new and more island-like appearance that emerged. Looking out of our windows, we felt so much closer to the beach. I turned at that moment away from the imported subdivision lawns and landscapes that I then realized were smothering the island and defacing its true identity no matter how pretty they were. I set out instead to define that identity, to mimic it, and to perfect it -- to learn how to design a landscape that belongs entirely to this barrier island and is just as pretty as my tropical dreamscapes too.

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And then along came Mary Ross, on her bike, one day in the summer of 1989 as I was tinkering with my experimental yard. Mary was an elected commissioner who had been appointed to start and be liaison to the city's first beautification committee. She invited me to join and I accepted. Excited by the island-style landscape I was developing, I drew up a professional set of plans to propose a comprehensive design for the entire grounds of the City Hall, Island Players Theater, and the adjacent recreation area. With $1500 seed money from the City Commission, a dozen volunteers, and plants donated from countless yards around the island, the project began.

Like those in my yard, the donated plants were all exotic and chosen by the usual standards: "will it grow here?" and "is it pretty?", to which we added, does it need irrigation to thrive?" The water crisis persisted. The press relentlessly urged conservation of water and flaunted the newest word of the day: "xeriscape" a make-word utilizing "xeric" from the Greek xeros (dry), as opposed to "mesic" (moderately wet) and "hydric" (wet), to describe plants and landscapes that do not require much additional irrigation to thrive.

In one bibliography I found this title: "Xeric Landscaping With Florida Native Plants." It was a slender magazine-sized book by the Association of Florida Native Nurseries that contained only lists of plants and in a context I had never before encountered.

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The plants were categorized not by the locations where they do grow, but rather by where they should grow. Plants and trees were listed for a location because they were native there, and as the title implied, would thus not require much more water than nature normally provided to succeed there. Few on the lists were known to me. But the idea behind them was sufficient to motivate me to find them and introduce them into our project.

It was sort of like handing an artist a palette of new paints. It was like leaving a kid alone in a candy store. I became determined to have at least one of each species on the lists specific to this island growing on the grounds just to see what it would do and look like. Every year for over a decade, more natives were added, more names from the lists were checked off as present and growing.

Endless consideration, discussion, and debate ensued around the questions "what are natives anyway?" and "why should we plant them instead of exotics?" It became standard fare at my own breakfast table several times a week as we perused our still-exotic garden and contrasted it to the increasingly radical discipline I came to follow in the selection of plants for the City Hall grounds. Ever so gradually, our understanding grew along with the plants.

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Natives, as the standard short definition goes, are the plants that were here before Columbus arrived. "So?" is the usual and not inappropriate followup question. There is a logic, however. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, plant species were seldom transplanted great distances away from their origin. The immigrants who first populated this continent were hunters and gatherers, but not farmers. Later pre-Columbian civilizations did not move around a lot. So the plants that came here by winds, waters, or in the bellies of living creatures over thousands of years, had settled by the arrival of Columbus into separate and distinct balanced systems specifically attuned to the local soil, climate, and wildlife. Plants that did not thrive there on their own soon disappeared, or were present only in the smallest numbers.

But the voyages of the explorers were occurrences in the European Renaissance of learning and wealth. Discoveries of all kinds were pursued with equal vigor for their economic, scientific, and entertainment value. The garden or greenhouse of exotic plants was a sign of wealth desired, and eventually achieved, by all. It became an entrenched tradition now taken for granted -- the tradition I followed to create that first beautiful alien landscape next to the natural beauty of the shore.

"So what?", you may now ask. "Why would a beautiful native landscape be any better than a beautiful exotic one?" It's a good question, and there is a good answer. To fully understand it, you need to run past your mind all that you remember about how you felt visiting state or national parks actually or in photos or films. In our every day life, we are surrounded by nature, and much of it is still made up of native vegetation, some of which is beautiful and the rest quite forgettable. The park areas, however, were selected to be preserved because they are not everyday nature. They represent in their own region the best of nature. They are ideal instances of a particular kind of landscape.

To be in one of those parks is an all encompassing experience. All the trees and plants and rocks and streams are taken in as one thing with one identity -- the park. When you leave, that identity is so clear, that 30 years later, you will still recognize film locations that are in the same state as that park you experienced long ago. Furthermore, no two parks have the same identity.

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That identity has a name. It is called the sense of place. It is what is unattainable where you live if your landscape is full of exotics. If you own a house at the beach and pave the driveway with bricks then surround it with palms from Egypt, Jamaica, Madagascar, and South Africa, there will not be any "sense of place." There will be a "sense of the nursery." You will not be living on the island, you will be living at an outpost of EPCOT -- a tiny, self-contained amusement park.

I was at first unaware of the sense of place thing. I loved the non-native plants so much, I was reluctant to give up all exotics. The exotics that were not harmful or overly aggressive I called "suitable non-natives", so I could keep them around. I also kept plants that were native to distant parts of Florida, labeling them "mainland natives." As the years passed, however, more and more island natives were added, and the first ones that had been planted matured into differing heights, widths, colors, and textures. As they did, a change came over the landscape. It was no longer a blend of plants from various places. It had grown a look -- an identity -- of its own. Suddenly, those "suitable non-natives" were not. They stuck out like sore thumbs. Even the tall Coconuts of my dreams I had grown from seed seemed foreign now, so I traded them to the nursery for some fat booted Cabbage palms.

The prophesy that was only implicit in those site specific lists was fulfilled. The grounds were no longer a garden to beautify the City, they had become a small example of a barrier island maritime forest that gave you a sense of place that was of this island. And with that success, I grasped and deeply regretted the waste of those years I struggled to rationalize and hold onto the exotics including the Florida natives that really belonged in the Pinelands across the bay or to other parts of Florida.

While such purism usually makes people nervous, there is good reason to sustain a strict discipline and use only plants native to the spot where they are planted. That is because the sense of place is not created by this plant or that plant. It is the result of particular combinations of plants. For example:

The Gumbo-limbo is one of our best trees. Its native range starts in the three counties surrounding Tampa Bay and extends over the whole Caribbean down to northern Venezuela. The Sugarberry tree is native from South Florida up to Indiana and out to Oklahoma. So natural landscapes never had both except in South Florida. The appearance of them together visually separates the look of South Florida from the look of North Florida and everywhere else.

Add to these a Southern magnolia with its oversized, creamy white blooms. It is native from the islands of this county northward into the row of 6 states from Texas to South Carolina. And add the elegant large shrub, the Spanish Stopper, that is native only from this county southward. Finally, surround all of these with low shrubs and groundcovers native to the beaches and maritime forests, and you will have captured the natural appearance not of the region or state, nor even of the immediate county. You will see the natural appearance of these and only these islands.

Now if one could drive down the main road of this island, with the houses on the beach side landscaped in plants indigenous to the beaches and backdunes, and on the other side of the street where the maritime forest starts, there would be Gumbo-limbos, Sugarberry trees, Magnolias, and Spanish Stoppers and the other mid-island natives, with the inevitable cross zone mixtures that occur where the two meet, one would experience to the fullest the look of this island and no other. It would be an experience not unlike those visits to state and national parks, and even with all of the houses in between.

But you don't have to wait for everyone else. You can create your own private preserve of the island's true identity. The others will follow you soon enough.

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"But I won't give up my orchids!" Nor would I. And not the Bougainvillea either. Nor should those who have a deep fascination with 'exotica' and 'tropica' -- those who study them and collect them -- give them up. The sense of place needs only that the broad appearance of the interconnecting landscapes be achieved with natives, while the individual residences remain highly individual.

This is achieved by growing exotics as if they were outdoor houseplants:

1. Grow only the most spectacularly beautiful and interesting exotics.

2. Grow only exotics that cannot spread volunteers into the native landscape and become a pest plant.

3. Grow exotics close to the house, preferably gathered near front, side, and rear doors, so they can frequently receive the extra monitoring and maintenance they usually require.

4. Grow as many as possible in a collection of beautiful pots. Many will grow better in pots with the right soil instead of island sand. In pots, they will be experienced more as extensions of the house rather than part of the landscape. Follow this rule: garden with exotics - landscape with natives.

Therefore, with your house, its interior and all your indoor and outdoor accessories, you honor and celebrate your own identity and character -- your personal sense of life. With the landscape, you honor and celebrate the identity and character of the island you chose to live on -- its unique sense of place.

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•  NOW SEE THE BEAUTY OF OUR ISLAND NATIVES IN THE GALLERY SECTION.

•  OR SEE PHOTOS OF ISLAND NATIVE LANDSCAPES IN MY MODELS SECTION.