During my PhD, I lucked out renting a late 19th century craftsman with a quintessential Florida yard; loads of invasive plants, grown in, and covered in fairly nasty vines. After clearing, trimming, and removing, I got to try my hand at a variety of plants some exotic, some native. Most of the exotics were Zingiberales and in a separate slideshow down the page. The highlights of the rest are below. Increasing insect diversity was a goal of the garden, so I planted many butterfly host plants as well as had three container ponds. We were rewarded with a bevy of butterflies, hymenopterans, dipterans, and orthopterans.