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Workers Make Sure City Has Look Of A Winner

Tribune photo by PENNY CARNATHAN

Geraniums provide eye-popping color in medians on Spruce Street at Lois Avenue and Westshore Boulevard. They were planted post-freeze.

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By PENNY CARNATHAN | The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 30, 2009

Nothing gets people out into their flowerbeds like a Super Bowl coming to town.

"The convention center, the Ybor historic district, the Tampa Downtown Partnership, local businesses, they're all planting and landscaping," an enthusiastic Jim Pinkney said last week.

He should know; he runs Tampa's Clean City Division. Along with the housekeeping chores you might expect, his crews help plant and tend some of Tampa's most visible gardens: the ones in the middle of the road.

Over the past three months, they've installed $170,000 worth of plants and mulch in the medians of "high-profile" local roads and along interstate ramps expected to see lots of visitor traffic. The shopping list included 3,422 pots of white fountain grass; 3,000 of evergreen giant grass; 2,200 of breeze grass, pots of petite ixoras, petunias, geraniums, perennial peanut, flax lily - it goes on and on.

Imagine all of that work and then - ZAP! - Tampa goes arctic. On Jan. 21, the city sat at 30 degrees for six hours, according to the National Weather Service. Birdbaths became tiny ice-skating rinks. Tropicals fried. The next night - POW! - a second blast.

"We haven't had a freeze like that in the last couple years," landscape architect Karla Price said. "But every year we have the Super Bowl, we get one."

Sigh.

This is the third Super Bowl that Price has helped prep for. She and Pinkney took the bad luck in stride.

"It's a 50-50 with the cold and trying to prepare for a big event," Pinkney said. "You have a Plan A and a Plan B, and if you have to, you go to Plan B."

Plan B included replacing dozens of bright red-orange-blossomed ixoras in the medians on Himes Avenue from Martin Luther King Boulevard to Columbus Drive. Workers covered them before the cold hit, but it wasn't enough for many of them. Those that survived were burnt, their shriveled little flash-frozen blooms a sorrowful testament to the promise they'd held as a backdrop to white petunia borders.

The guys who've been out there planting, watering and generally giving their horticultural all were a little less pragmatic about the hits.

"It's sad to see the plants dying because of the freeze. They make the city nice when you see all the green and all the flowers," Sandro Morales said as he and Kendrick Atwood Sr. watered new beds of fountain grass on Spruce Street.

"Everyone's put their hard work into making Tampa pretty for the Super Bowl," Atwood said.

It's a tough job, especially in January. Days can get pretty hot if you're sitting in the middle of a road. Nights, as we've seen, can get very cold. Price tries to choose plants that can stand up to both extremes - and not interfere with motorist visibility.

She chose white petunias for the tips of Himes' medians because they hold up well this time of year, and the white should pop on the shadier stretches. Her favorite median plant is flax lily.

"It has a wider leaf and it gives you a nice contrast against plants with darker green foliage, like Indian Hawthorne."

Tampa spent $40,000 for the landscaping; the rest came from the state Department of Transportation. The nice thing for us is a lot of it will be around for years to come.

The first Super Bowl saw trees planted at the off-ramps at Hillsborough Avenue and Dale Mabry Highway, and Dale Mabry and Interstate 275, Price said. "Those trees are still there."

For the 1991 Super Bowl, we got about 3,000 palms and 100 oaks along our highways.

"Now," Price said, "we're just filling in the gaps."

Reporter Penny Carnathan can be reached at (813) 259-7612.

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