Real Plants Florida
Growing, planting and promoting
Florida native plants for sustainable landscapes.
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Seagrape trees grow across a stretch of boardwalk. Natural arbors are enchanting and can provide much needed shade. But be sure to see the forest for the trees ...

About Seagrape pruning and maintaining dune ecosystems

Sometimes you need to cut down or burn native trees and other vegetation to give more native plants a chance. Ecosystems are all about diversity and in our fragmented landscapes, management by we the humans is a must to maintain […]

Palm Beach County Plant Communities Map segment

History of the Plant Communities Map

  The Plant Communities Map used on this website is directly adapted from the original “General Map of Natural Vegetation of Florida” developed by John Henry Davis, University of Florida (UF), and published in 1967 by UF’s Agricultural Experiment Station, […]

Monarch Butterflies nectaring on Swamp Milkweed. Photo by Peg Urban.

Save our Monarchs: Plant Native Milkweed

  The monarch butterfly is one of our most easily recognized butterflies and well known for its long migration across North America. Unfortunately, the loss of natural habitat, in particular native milkweeds, has resulted in dwindling monarch populations vulnerable to […]

About the Plant Communities Map

Broward County is one of Florida’s most heavily urbanized areas. Yet it was probably one of the most botanically diverse, with more than a dozen different native plant communities, as shown on this close-up view of the Plant Communities map. […]

North Florida Sandhill

About Native Plant Communities

Why Native Plant Communities are Important Models for Landscape Design – philosophy statement by Michael Jameson, native plant grower and founding member of FANN When children are nurtured and raised into adulthood, the ideal is that these people will then […]

Coreopsis field

Why Local Matters: Ecotypes & Provenance

A fundamental selling point for native plants is that they are naturally adapted to the place they occur – the soils, climate, natural water regime (not sprinkler systems), and surrounding plants, animals, insects and other organisms. This natural adaptation makes […]