Reddit mentions of Native Florida Plants: Low Maintenance Landscaping and Gardening

It infuriates me that people like you come out here with a total disregard for the Earth and our endangered species. What you do should be illegal. Industrial society had no real right to turn the Everglades into a city in the first place, and now that it is, we have to initiate expensive and labor-intensive projects to remove the invasive plants and try to corral the damage. Drainage has almost obliterated what was once here, and agriculture has toxified the land to the point where people - human beings - have no clean tap water to drink in places like Weston, and other parts of Broward.

And another thing - mosquitoes. Native Americans report that before the Everglades were drained, we didn't have so many mosquitoes around, because they can't breed so easily in running water. After the drainage, mosquitoes started reproducing to the point of takeover, because of all the standing water now available.

I know that I won't convince you of anything in a Reddit post, but since your business is in landscaping, there are options which are part of the solution, rather than the problem - you could distribute native rather than invasive ornamentals if you wanted to. People do that.

Laws against invasive plants - which may not exist, but should - wouldn't be fascism any more than laws against marine pollution are fascism. Respect for the Earth is not fascism. It's common sense. Every high schooler should know this. Even if you don't care about endangered plants or animals, these things ultimately affect human beings as well.

I'm sorry that the only reason why you came to South Florida was to start a business which perpetuates harm to our land. But you don't have to do this.

Of course, not all exotic plants are bad - the agriculture on which we depend is all exotic plants - but the exotic invasives, the ones which spread rapidly and take over, and kill native species and prevent them from regenerating - we need to get rid of those as soon as possible, from our lawns, from our parks, from our schools, from everywhere.

Also, slash pines do survive in urban environments - you can see a whole bunch of them off the Palmetto highway around 37th Avenue, and around the Opa Locka area. They thrive in our bad soils, and, interestingly, die when given fertilizer.

We can never restore South Florida to its original state. But we can work with the land, rather than sadistically and systematically destroying it. Of course, sea level change over the coming decades will make all of this a moot point.