The Beauty and Resilience of Florida-Friendly Gardens

“Take your little piece of land and steward it. It will give you a sense of power. Your choices matter. You can make a difference.”

With punishing wind, rain and flooding, Hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton took a terrible toll not just on the people of Southwest Florida and our built environment, but also on our home gardens, big and small. As a result, many nature lovers are scrambling to rebuild their slices of paradise, and local nurseries say more and more customers are asking questions about native plants.

But what counts as native? Indigenous plants are technically defined as species that existed here before the Europeans arrived 450 years ago, and more than 3,000 varieties fall into the category. While prized for their aesthetic qualities, as well as their role as feeders and pollinators for butterflies, birds, bees, insects and wildlife, native trees and plants are also typically stronger than their counterparts when it comes to tolerating saltwater and surviving high winds.

In general, indigenous gardens appear less manicured, organized or formal than a yard filled with exotics. Often asymmetrical in shape, size and placement, native and Florida-friendly plants overflow with an infinite variety of foliage, berries and fragrant flowers that offer food for migratory birds and insects, without sacrificing eye candy for humans.

Set amid 24 acres of pinewoods, Parrish’s Sweet Bay Nursery was founded by Tom Heitzman in 1995. Heitzman’s mantra is a refrain shared by experts: “The right plant in the right place.” That philosophy is good for the environment, good for flora and fauna, and good for people who love gardening. “You can always have something of interest blooming,” Heitzman says.

But while native gardens may be sturdier and better for the environment, that doesn’t mean they don’t need care. “Every garden needs maintenance,” says Heitzman. Even spaces filled with Florida-friendly plants require watering, weeding, deadheading and pruning.

Laurel Schiller is a wildlife biologist who founded Florida Native Plants in Old Miakka in 1982 and now works alongside her daughter Annie. Together, the two are a treasure trove of information and helpful tips. The live oaks, slash pines and cabbage palms at Florida Native Plants tell you you’re in one of the last rural areas of Sarasota County, where gardeners can experience what Old Florida used to be like and consult with the Schillers. The two even make house calls, during which they help people by asking questions about what they hope to achieve with their garden. Are they planting for privacy and screening from neighbors? Do they want ground cover? Are they getting rid of their costly green lawn?

Annie Schiller is effusive about the “amazing qualities” of native and Florida-friendly plants with a purpose—like Panama rose, hybrid porter weed and red pentas that help “overwintering pollinators.” She also recommends hardy edible herbs and fruits that are good for human consumption. In her view, there’s no such thing as a bad gardener.

As our region continues to recover from last year’s storms, there’s never been a better time to plant a Florida-friendly garden. Fertilizers containing nitrogen and phosphorus dissolve in our water, eventually flowing into the Gulf of Mexico and leading to harmful algal blooms like red tide. Many native plants don’t require fertilizer at all, and they have the added benefit of being able to absorb runoff and prevent pollutants from reaching the Gulf in the first place.

“Take your little piece of land and steward it,” Annie says. “It will give you a sense of power. Your choices matter. You can make a difference.”

Cindy Shore Coats’ Bradenton garden

Image: Mick Hales

Behind a picturesque cottage near the Manatee River in Bradenton, Cindy Shore Coats tends an organic garden created from a blank slate that has evolved into a beloved work-in-progress. Coats, who works at Sweet Bay, caught the gardening bug when she lived in Miami. After studying landscape architecture in graduate school, she dove enthusiastically into the world of horticulture and native plants.

Coats’ cheerful and cozy urban oasis is ever-changing. Her house is only about 1,000 square feet, but the fenced back yard adds an additional 1,000. “I really want to have this all full so I can pretend I don’t have any neighbors and I’m in my own private, natural area,” she says. She’s designed a tamed jungle with a winding shell path and discrete outdoor “rooms” and garden beds that beckon human visitors. The snug backyard is a feast for the eyes, like a fairytale hideaway where Coats and her husband entertain and relax, and where a firepit warms them in winter. Plants like hanging mistletoe cactus add personality and quirky delight. “I like to have the ‘wow’ factor,” Coats says.

A drought-tolerant succulent thrives in a pot.

Image: Mick Hales

There’s an area for cardinals, blue jays and tufted titmice to bathe and play. Woodpeckers, finches and grackles also make their rounds. Mixed in are various container plants, some food plants, herbs and tomatoes. Even in steamy weather, the garden is cooled by shady trees.

“There are a lot of people who think that a shade garden is a challenge because you can’t grow grass,” Coats says. “Well, I don’t do grass, and there are a lot of beautiful plants you can grow in the shade. And you get to enjoy your garden because you can be out here in the summer, even in the middle of the day.” In her garden, you’ll also find a workshop and a “she shed,” and accent lights enhance the atmosphere, especially at night.

Fragrant Simpson’s stopper bushes provide screening with tiny white fragrant flowers and red berries that are perfect for birds. Visual interest comes from the plant’s various tones of green and the interesting texture of its exfoliating bark and leaves.

“My biggest satisfaction is watching the birds and butterflies and just sitting back and looking around at my creation, knowing that the wildlife also enjoys it,” Coats says. Animals may not appreciate the funky chandeliers and sculptures crafted by Coats’ mom and other local artists, but that’s OK. A garden of delights is much more than just plants.

Pam Callendar’s garden contains more than 350 plants and 130 different species.

Image: Mick Hales

Pam Callender, a master gardener and visual artist, is widely considered a guru of native gardening. Her Kensington Park home sits at the terminus of a dead-end road that was once forested, but is now an impermeable cement compound. She’s installed a buffer of green between herself and her neighbors and labors faithfully to establish native plants as an antidote to all the pavement.

Callender calls herself an “eco artist” because she uses the “relationships between all living things, plants and the natural world as her medium.” In her work, she explores environmental issues, climate change and sustainability. She’s not a plant purist, though. She experiments with material from every part of Florida while paying attention to seasonal cycles and the connections between predators and prey and flora and fauna. “I’m a teacher who always learns from her plants,” she says.

Callender’s favorites are eight sturdy and adaptable dwarf yaupon holly, also known as “vomitoria” because Native Americans brewed them into a tea when they needed to purge. Other stars are cocoplum, coastal fiddlewood and the fast-growing, versatile, hurricane-resistant gumbo limbo tree, of which Callender has five. Wild lime, meanwhile, blooms year-round and hosts giant swallowtail butterflies.

Blooming cactus

Image: Mick Hales

Callender teaches classes for the Sarasota Audubon Society at the Celery Fields and delivers presentations to homeowner association groups. That often leads to commissions to design new landscapes in neighborhoods around the county. She spends weeks drawing up huge site plans, then supervises the placement of thousands of plants in a wide variety of public settings, including micro-forests, living walls, meadows, berms and nature walks.

As she tours her garden, she walks through more than 350 plants made up of 130 species, of which only 13 are non-native. (They’re being replaced one by one.) In the process of making the space her own, she’s torn out invasives like melaleucas, vines and Brazilian peppers. She’s especially excited by a snag, made from the wood of a tree killed during a controlled burn. It looks like a big, scraggly, black totem pole and has a place of honor in the front garden, serving as a bird perch. As if on cue, a painted bunting alights on the kitchen window bird feeder for a snack while a mockingbird dives into a bush to eat a berry.

Trees Glosser planted years ago tower over the landscape.

Image: Mick Hales

For 30 years, David Glosser owned Plant Parents, a provider of plant design, landscaping, sales, rentals and maintenance in Sarasota. (The business is now known as Natura.) Today, he is studying and learning all he can about native plants to become certified as a master naturalist with the University of Florida. He tours botanical gardens for ideas and is highly conscious of water and land stewardship.

Glosser is not a Florida-friendly purist, but like a skilled conductor, he strives to create a symphony of harmonious notes from his ornamental and native gardens, which line all four sides of his Bent Tree home. With one foot in both native and non-native garden worlds, he calls himself a “hybrid.”

In a wild green space in the backyard, Glosser is taking out all the invasive species and replacing them with clumping bamboo and indigenous plants. He’s also repurposing native orchids he salvaged after the hurricanes, attaching them to live oak trees throughout the neighborhood. His eye is trained on shape and color, informed by where and how the epiphytes grow best. Trees planted decades ago tower over the landscape, and garden beds in the front of the house now hold wax myrtle, American beautyberry, cabbage palm, slash pines, palmettos and coffee plants.

Calliandra tergemina’s hot pink blossoms pop against green leaves in David Glosser’s yard.

Image: Mick Hales

According to Glosser, when you look out the window from your home, your view should always be rewarded by something pleasing to the eye. In Glosser’s case, he and his wife Stephanie are often wowed by dozens of orchids, hundreds of dramatic and unusual bromeliads in pots, and luscious bougainvillea displayed like bouquets in pieces of driftwood. Inside the couple’s screened pool cage is a parade of epiphytes that Glosser has collected. He experiments with cuttings and varieties and says that “every plant has a story.”

Shrimp plants and pentas peek out of rocks, lending seasonal color. Glosser rotates in caladiums and impatiens, both annuals, for extra color. Many of the plants, such as purple ginger and pink-and-green-leaved snow on the mountain, were planted 15 years ago. Privacy is achieved with podocarpus, viburnum and areca palms. In the backyard, Glosser has created outdoor spaces for humans to lounge in and observe nature, along with a garden path of crushed limestone. He’s always on the lookout for new plants and ideas.

The sandy soil is built up with mulch and bark chips and offers wildlife a “healthy organic biome” to feed on, Glosser says. Salvia, penta, goldenrod and coral bean are just some of the treats for butterflies that he’s increasing as he practices “remedial horticulture” to better protect the environment. A lifelong learner, Glosser says he finds it “very fulfilling” to expand his universe of knowledge and change his garden accordingly.

Susan and Howard Levine’s landscaping reflects the timeless design of their Sarasota School of Architecture home.

Image: Mick Hales

Native gardens can be luxe, too. Susan Levine and her husband Howard bought a modern home designed by world-famous architect Carl Abbott in 2021. The home, built in 1986 for artist Florence Putterman on Pansy Bayou, has won numerous awards for its timeless design—a synthesis of art and nature that intertwines striking architecture, unspoiled water views and greenery accentuated by a panoply of blossoming flowers.

A star of the Sarasota School of Architecture movement and a landscape architect and native garden enthusiast, Abbott has always been inspired by the land. He embraced the topography, vegetation, ambient light and fluctuations of weather at the Levines’ home, endeavoring to conserve natural resources and protect Florida’s unique ecosystem.

The starkly linear front elevation of the house boasts a row of towering royal palms planted 40 years ago. They make a dramatic vertical statement against dazzling blue skies and the monochrome mass of the home’s beige front wall. Susan recently installed Barbara Karst bougainvillea along the top of the privacy wall. As it grows, a shock of color flows down and over with an explosion of magenta-red bracts and white flowers. Another addition is the electric blue sculpture of a giant wave (also designed by Abbott) that contrasts with the white shell ground cover inside the courtyard.

Bougainvillea provides a shock of color with its explosion of magenta-red bracts and white flowers next to an electric blue sculpture of a giant wave designed by Carl Abbott.

Image: Mick Hales

Then you open the front doorway, and floor-to-ceiling glass reveals a massive pool deck, garden beds and the water. A sparkling saltwater pool and new spa draw your eye along a straight axis southwest, directly across Pansy Bayou to a green nature preserve that can never be developed. A kayak shell path lined with seagrape and flanked by tailored black mangroves winds down to the shimmering water.

A 5,500-square-foot composite deck serves as an extended terrace that juts out over the bayou. It’s the largest construction of its kind installed in Lido Shores and required a special permit from the city to build. Below, in the marsh, Susan keeps wetland plants that can sustain having “wet feet,” such as the sea-oxeye daisy budding with yellow flowers that withstands wind, tides and saltwater intrusion. The east and west gardens flanking the terrace have new Florida-friendly flora planted since the 2024 storms. Susan says the backyard was lush before the hurricanes and that last year the butterflies and bees were abundant. With thoughtful replanting of the right foliage, she hopes the garden will come back to life.

“We believe that all of our plant materials should be Florida-friendly and bring butterflies and other pollinators,” she says.

The east and west gardens flanking the terrace have new Florida-friendly flora planted since the 2024 storms.

Image: Mick Hales

In the east garden, there’s pink flowering muhly grass and a salt-tolerant ground cover called golden beach creeper. Desert cassia trees grew back after the storms and beckon pollinators with their yellow flowers. To the west, Susan concentrated on healthy new plantings that inject color and diversity. Selected for their salt tolerance and their function as pollinators, bright red copperleaf shrubs surround Texas sage with green-blue leaves and blue flowers. Amid this riot of plant life, an unusual weeping bottlebrush is recovering from its battle with the last year’s wind and saltwater and is festooned with hardy red blossoms.

For added drama, the Levines accented their gardens and deck with lighting that sets the right mood. The blending of environmentally sensitive and visually pleasing features makes for an outdoor utopia, a union of the man-made and natural worlds in an opulent space of tranquility and beauty.