Tending to What Matters

A 2-hour in-home visit anywhere from Sarasota to Port Charlotte is a flat $185, including a written plant plan and a follow-up call. A 45-minute virtual consult is $65, with a $29 booking deposit and $36 due at consultation. The Grove program, with four seasonal visits, storm priority, and year-round support, is $1,995 per year. There are no hidden fees; a small travel surcharge applies only beyond 20 miles from Nokomis, always confirmed before booking.

Very often, yes. Most struggling plants in Southwest Florida have fixable problems: overwatering, nutrient deficiencies in our sandy soil, salt exposure, or treatable pests. A diagnosis visit tells you honestly whether a plant can recover and exactly what to do, or whether replacing it is the smarter spend.

Same-week bookings are usually available across the whole service area, from Sarasota down to Port Charlotte. If a plant is declining quickly, call. Palms and sagos in particular are easier to save the earlier they are treated.

I do not sell living plants or provide landscaping services. I am expanding Evergreen with curated planters and architectural vessels, plus Evergreen soil mixes and plant care kits. The Evergreen soil presale has 2, 4 and 8 qt options, with the first batch expected ready by January 1, 2027. Products will be optional purchases, separate from consultations and memberships. You can still get a care plan and use supplies you already own. For living plants or landscaping work, I can recommend local nurseries and licensed contractors.

No. Many clients start from zero, and a consultation is actually the best time to begin: we figure out exactly what your space can support before you spend a dollar on plants.

The one that genuinely frightens me is the sago palm, which is not a palm at all but a cycad: every part contains cycasin, it causes liver failure in dogs and cats, and even one or two seeds can be fatal. Everything else on the usual list is milder. Pothos, monstera, philodendron, peace lily, and ZZ plant all contain insoluble calcium oxalates, which cause burning, drooling, and mouth swelling if chewed. Painful, rarely fatal. If you want good-looking plants you can put at floor level and forget, I steer people toward calatheas and prayer plants, spider plants, most true ferns, and parlor palms, all on the ASPCA non-toxic list. When I treat pests during a visit I plan the products around the animals in the house, so having a dog does not mean living with a mealybug problem.

No, and I say that as gently as I can, because it is the most common piece of advice out there. Misting raises the humidity around a leaf for a few minutes until the water evaporates, which is nowhere near long enough to change what the plant experiences, and on fussy plants it can encourage leaf spotting. What actually works in an air-conditioned Florida home: run a humidifier in the room, group plants together so they share the moisture they release, use a pebble tray with the pot sitting above the waterline, move plants out of direct vent airflow, and put a cheap hygrometer in the room so you know your real numbers. Keep the mister for washing dust off leaves and applying treatments, which is what it is genuinely good for.

Repot on signals rather than on a calendar: roots circling the inside of the pot or escaping the drainage hole, water rushing straight through in seconds, or growth that has simply stalled. For most houseplants that works out to every one to two years, and you size up only one or two inches, never more, because a big pot around a small root system holds wet soil nothing is drinking from. On feeding, our long growing season shifts the usual advice: plants here often keep growing gently through what a northern grower would call winter, so rather than stopping in autumn, feed lightly whenever the plant is actively pushing new growth and ease off when it is not. Flush every pot with plain water every couple of months to wash out the mineral salts that accumulate from our hard tap water and from fertilizer.

Yes, and it is a large part of what I do here. For snowbirds and anyone travelling for weeks at a time, the Canopy membership at $75 a month keeps me checking in and available, and the Grove program at $1,995 a year adds four seasonal in-home visits plus priority post-storm triage, which is the combination most seasonal residents end up wanting. Before you leave I do a pre-departure checkup: group plants for humidity, adjust everything back from the windows, set up self-watering or wicking arrangements where they make sense, and move anything vulnerable off the lanai. You come back to a collection that looks like it did when you left.