Florida Friendly Landscaping Webinar
Well-designed community landscapes depend on far more than good intentions, and the Florida friendly landscaping principles give boards a science-based framework for plant selection, water use, and long-term maintenance costs. We recently hosted a CEU course featuring Shane Humble of Complete Property Maintenance, who taught board members and property managers the best management practices behind each principle.
This insightful webinar examined the six principles of Florida friendly landscaping, including right plant, right place, efficient watering, and appropriate fertilization. Attendees also saw how early design choices shape irrigation performance, plant health, and maintenance budgets for decades.
Disclaimer: This video is for educational purposes only. You will not receive credits for watching the recording. Credits were issued only to those that attended the course.
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Key Takeaways
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Six Guiding Principles: Right plant, right place, efficient watering, appropriate fertilization, mulching, attraction of wildlife, and responsible pest management form the framework Florida adopted for landscape irrigation and design standards.
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Weather Stations Beat Rain Sensors: Rain sensors dry out in Florida heat and let a system run after a storm, while weather stations track evapotranspiration by zip code and can substantially cut a community’s water use.
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Mulch Depth Decides the Result: Mulch needs a minimum depth of two to three inches to block the sunlight weed seeds require, which is why a single inch of blow-in material accomplishes almost nothing.
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Licensing Is the Board’s Business: Fertilizer, pesticide, and herbicide application has required certification since 2014, and a community can face a fine when a vendor’s licensure is not documented on site.
What Are the Six Florida Friendly Landscaping Principles?
The six principles are right plant, right place, efficient watering, appropriate fertilization, mulching, attraction of wildlife, and responsible management of pests. They trace back to 2004, when the Florida Legislature directed the water management districts, the Department of Environmental Protection, and other interested parties to create standards for landscape irrigation and Florida friendly landscape design. Those standards were adopted in 2006, and many municipalities went on to fold the same requirements into local ordinances.
Taken together, the principles describe a landscape built from a combination of ornamental ground covers, trees, and turf grass, weighted toward native plant material and well adapted to the specific conditions where it is planted. Municipalities enforce this through a planting matrix that sets how many native species and how much ground cover or turf a site must include before it can be approved.
Design Decisions Come First
Landscape planning is usually the afterthought on a new site. The first question developers ask is how to maximize the buildable footprint while minimizing environmental impact and still meeting buyer expectations, all while satisfying a municipality’s requirements for parking counts, pedestrian circulation, landscape material, and stormwater runoff from thousands of square feet of new pavement.
Those competing pressures are why the same questions surface years later at the association level. Where wildlife was displaced, how erosion will be handled, how noise is buffered, and how much heat the site retains are all determined at design, then inherited by the board that has to maintain the result.
The Soil Problem Nobody Sees
A cleared site spends its construction phase under heavy machinery, trucks, and parked vehicles, which leaves the soil and future bed areas severely compacted. When a site sits too low, additional fill is trucked in or excavated from a newly dug lake, and that material is typically non-native, inert, and nutrient-starved.
Plant material then goes directly into that layer. It explains much of the struggle communities experience in the first year or two after a landscape is installed, long before anyone questions the maintenance program.
Right Plant, Right Place in Practice
Right plant, right place means letting a site evaluation drive plant selection and placement rather than a preference for a particular species. The material chosen should match the property’s characteristics and serve a function, whether that is shading a walkway or parking area, reducing heat across impervious surfaces, lowering cooling costs for the building it surrounds, screening a roadway, or creating a smooth transition from structure to landscape.
Cultural Practices Work Together
Mowing height, pruning method, fertilizer selection, and how water reaches the material sound like separate decisions, but they are inseparable in practice. Fertilizing during a drought period can lead to heavy leaching once a strong rain arrives, and material that is inadequately fed grows thin and weak.
From there, the chain is predictable. Weakened plants become more susceptible to insects and disease, a shallow root system cannot hold the soil around the root zone, and the result is erosion and the potential for water pollution.
Narrow Beds and Hot Strips
Commercial and residential sites both tend to squeeze planting areas down to whatever the parking, sidewalks, and storage leave behind, and an 18-inch band of turf grass in that space is set up to fail. It is difficult to cut, it sits against concrete, it struggles to disperse heat, and no irrigation head reaches it without overshooting or flooding the area. A strip of grass boxed in by asphalt on one side and concrete on the other can run about 20 degrees hotter than the same grass in the open.
Mulch is often ruled out in those spaces on cost, which usually leaves a shrub or an ornamental grass as the correct choice. One of the more successful commercial designs discussed in the course did exactly that, using ornamental grasses in place of turf and setting oaks in curbed islands so roots grow downward and the parking spaces get shade without creating a strip no mower can reach.
Watering Efficiently Across a Community
Florida receives roughly 40 to 55 inches of rainfall a year and native plants need about the same amount, so the problem is never the annual total. Rainfall is sporadic and unevenly distributed across the twelve months, which means an irrigation system exists to supplement during dry stretches and should be shut down during wet ones.
Smart Controllers and Weather Stations
Rain sensors are the common approach and the weakest one. They rely on a float or a cork that swells to interrupt watering, but Florida heat dries the cork out or evaporates the collected water, so a system that shut down during an afternoon storm is free to run at four the next morning. Weather stations monitor humidity, rainfall, and temperature, measure evapotranspiration, update themselves by zip code as weather moves in, and can be set to the soil type on site.
The difference shows up on the water bill. A 960-home Audubon signature community in Palm Beach Gardens was exceeding its annual water allowance by double, and within three months of installing a weather-based system and letting it acclimate, consumption came down to roughly 50 percent of its actual annual allotment. Proper design, installation, and management also extend pump life, reduce electricity use, and help material develop the stronger root systems that make it more drought-resistant and pest-resistant. In a region sitting on top of an aquifer, where everything applied at the surface eventually leaches down into the water supply, using less water and fewer chemicals is its own return.
“Plants don’t waste water. They’re going to take in what they can take in and stop, but people do.” - Shane Humble, Complete Property Maintenance
Zoning Rotors, Mist Heads, and Bubblers
The main irrigation problem inside a community is a lack of division. Older systems frequently put rotors and mist heads on the same zone, and separating them matters, with rotors on their own zone, mist heads handling narrow strips of turf, bubblers serving palms and trees, and annuals broken out separately. Otherwise, a zone delivers far more water than some of the material on it can use.
Layout creates its own traps. Zero-lot-line homes can have a zone on each side just six feet apart in what is effectively a drainage swale where almost nothing will grow, and the north face of a two-story home may never see sun. It is also worth retiring the idea that turf and plants cannot be harmed by too much water, since overwatering invites fungus and creates anaerobic conditions that drown the root system.
Fertilizing Within Florida’s Limits
Fertilizer practice in Florida is bounded by rules worth knowing before a program is approved. Phosphorus cannot be applied in this region, nitrogen on St. Augustine is limited to roughly one to one and a half pounds per thousand square feet per application with applications typically spaced quarterly, and since 2014 a certification has been required to apply fertilizer at all, carrying a substantial fine for anyone applying without one. Soil analysis is widely available through labs and takes the guesswork out of what a particular site actually needs.
Reading the Label and Judging Solubility
The grade, or analysis, refers to the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium the manufacturer guarantees is in the bag, and the label is required by law on every bag. A landscaper can supply that label on request, showing the manufacturer, the analysis, the secondary nutrients, and the weight, so there is no reason for a manager not to have it.
Solubility is where price differences live. A higher water-insoluble percentage breaks down more slowly, much like peanut butter on a knife under running water, so anything below 50 percent is a weak blend, while blends in the 75 to 100 percent range hold up long enough that applications can be spread further apart. For a community that often means lower cost, fewer visits, and less disruption on site, which matters as operating costs climb across Florida communities.
The Ring of Responsibility
Most communities have a body of water somewhere, usually built to contain runoff or to serve as an irrigation source, and fertilizer cannot be applied within 10 feet of it with a broadcast spreader. A drop spreader, which releases material straight out of the hopper instead of spinning it, can work somewhat closer.
Two related cautions came up alongside it. New grass should not be fertilized for at least 30 to 60 days so freshly cut roots are not burned, and fertigation, the practice of running fertilizer through the irrigation system, has effectively disappeared after coating vehicles and buildings wherever it was tried.
Feed at the Drip Line
Fertilizer applied at the base of a palm or tree is largely wasted, because very little root system is feeding there. The root-shoot ratio puts the feeder roots out at the edge of the canopy, so the drip zone is the correct target even though that often means placing material out in the grass where nobody sees it.
Why Mulch Depth Determines the Result
Mulch only does its job at a minimum depth of two to three inches. Blow-in applications that leave an inch of material accomplish almost nothing, because enough sunlight still reaches the weed seeds already present in the soil for them to germinate, while at two and a half to three inches there is not enough light to trigger them.
Depth aside, mulch earns its place in several ways at once. It slows the loss of water to evaporation, holds a more uniform soil temperature, and keeps the soil from crusting over, which improves both absorption and percolation rates. As it breaks down it returns nutrients to the soil, plants will sometimes push roots up into it to take advantage, and it gives beds a finished look that the region’s gray sand never provides.
Rocks Are Not Mulch
The idea that rocks are simply a longer-lasting version of mulch does not hold up. Rocks retain heat and raise the soil temperature beneath them, which drives moisture out faster and leaves plants struggling for water, and they contribute no nutrients as they age.
That does not rule them out, but it narrows what belongs around them. A rock installation calls for genuinely drought-tolerant material such as bromeliads and agaves that can handle the added heat.
Mowing and Pruning for Plant Health
St. Augustine, or Floritam, should be mowed at around four inches, within the University of Florida range of roughly 3.5 to 4.5 inches, and no more than a third of the blade should come off in a single cut. Cutting higher in winter when growth slows and the interval between visits is longer, and closer to 3.5 to 4 inches in the summer growing season, keeps the turf from being scalped. Kept at the right height and mowed at least 36 times a year, it holds density, develops root health, and suppresses weeds on its own, which reduces the need for herbicide.
Mowing too low reverses all of it, letting weed seeds germinate and shortening the root system until the turf cannot take up water or nutrients efficiently. One northern habit is worth unlearning here: St. Augustine should not be aerated or de-thatched, since the clippings are meant to drop back into the turf and break down into nutrients the grass reuses.
Why Mechanical Trimming Is the Norm
Growth rates make hand pruning impractical at community scale. Material commonly puts on four to six inches in a matter of weeks, some species add three or four feet in three weeks, and the planting matrices required for a certificate of occupancy in Palm Beach, Broward, Martin, and St. Lucie counties mean there is a great deal of it. Because a landscaper’s fee reflects hours on site, hedge trimmers and other mechanical tools are what keep the work inside a budget.
Pruning still serves real purposes when it is done deliberately. It improves plant health, reduces the risk of failure, clears dying branches, controls growth, and can enhance flowering or fruiting, though tight site constraints rarely allow a plant to reach its full potential. Clearing weak and overextended limbs is also part of preparing a community for hurricane season, since overgrown material is what tends to come down in a storm.
The Topping Myth
Cutting the top off a leggy, see-through shrub will not thicken its base. There is no correlation between the two, and the only way to fill in a thin lower section is to prune selectively in that area, where each branch cut produces two in its place.
“If you want to make your plant, or shrub, or hedge line thicker at the bottom, you have to directly go to that area.” - Shane Humble, Complete Property Maintenance
Managing Pests Responsibly
Integrated pest management treats mowing, trimming, fertilizing, and irrigation as the first line of pest control rather than reaching straight for a chemical. Mowing at the correct height, trimming at the right point in the season, watering fertilizer in appropriately, and monitoring irrigation so only what is needed goes out all reduce pest pressure before any product is considered. New pests keep arriving in the state through container shipping, so the need never disappears entirely, but a sound agronomic program shrinks it considerably.
“With the right plant, right place principle utilized, pesticides could definitely become a thing of the past.” - Shane Humble, Complete Property Maintenance
Identify the Pest and Its Life Stage
Effective control depends on catching a pest at the right point in its life cycle. An egg’s protective covering leaves very little to work with, while larvae and nymphs are far easier to address either culturally or chemically. Lubber grasshoppers illustrate the difference well, since they are manageable while small and black and nearly impossible to kill once they reach adulthood no matter what is sprayed on them.
Identifying the pest and the plant it is on comes first, then the life stage, and only then the approach. Choosing among cultural, mechanical, physical, and biological options before applying a corrective measure is what separates integrated pest management from routine spraying.
Confirm Licenses, Certifications, and Coverage
Vendor credentials are squarely a board and management concern, because requirements change and the community carries part of the exposure. Every landscaper should hold an occupational license, either a limited certification or a commercial landscape maintenance certification issued through the FNGLA. Any company providing pest control must be licensed in the state with a certified operator, and tree work should be performed by a licensed certified arborist. Workers’ compensation is not required of businesses with fewer than three employees, which leaves a larger association unnecessarily vulnerable in an accident, and licensure records for pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides belong in the association’s files alongside insurance certificates and vendor contracts, since an undocumented applicator can expose the community as well as the applicator to a fine.
Adopting the Practices in Your Community
The Florida friendly landscaping statutes do not supersede an association’s declaration. A board that wants these practices in place adopts them through its own landscape specifications and RFP rather than relying on the statute to override recorded requirements, and some variances in what is already planted will always dictate how a particular site has to be maintained.
Building the Principles Into the Scope of Work
Much of the best management practice already overlaps with routine HOA landscape maintenance, which makes the transition less dramatic than it sounds. Specifying mowing heights, fertilizer blends and application frequency, mulch depth, and irrigation zoning inside the scope of work turns the principles into contract language a vendor can be measured against, whether the property is an HOA or a condo association. A landscaper generally wants the property to look its best and to serve as a reference, so specifications drawn from these practices tend to align with what a good contractor already intends to do.
Finding the Plant List for Your Zone
Plant recommendations are regional, and the zones vary considerably from Vero Beach down through Miami-Dade, so a statewide list is of limited use. The practical source is the local University of Florida IFAS extension office and its Best Management Practices booklet, which sets out the native and recommended plants for a specific area. Mounts Botanical Garden in West Palm Beach is one such extension, and the University of Florida site will generate a list once an area is entered.
Landscapes That Hold Up Over Time
The six principles are less a checklist than a way of connecting decisions that are usually made in isolation. Plant selection sets the irrigation demand, irrigation shapes root depth, root depth determines how much fertilizer and pest control a landscape genuinely needs, and something as unremarkable as mulch depth quietly influences all three. When a community writes those relationships into its specifications and holds its vendors to them, the landscape stops being a recurring expense to defend each budget cycle and becomes an asset that grows more resilient, less thirsty, and less costly to maintain with every passing season.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should green palm fronds be removed when palms are trimmed?
No, removing green fronds runs directly against University of Florida standards, because those fronds are the main way a palm feeds itself. They should come off only once they have browned out and are no longer providing any resource to the tree, even when a frond is rubbing against a building.
What can be planted to keep residents from cutting through landscape beds?
Thorny and sharp-edged material works best, starting with bougainvillea along a fence or hedge line where it gets full sun and good drainage, such as on a berm. Serrated varieties of yucca serve the same purpose, and agaves with their sharp pointed tips are effective as a lower filler beneath a hedgerow.
How far from a home should a live oak be planted?
A live oak should sit at least 30 to 40 feet from a home, since South Florida specimens can reach 50 to 60 feet in both height and spread. Lot sizes in the region make that spacing difficult to achieve, and the placement is usually dictated by the municipality’s approved plan rather than by the landscape installer.
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Ashley Dietz is the VP of Marketing at Campbell Property Management and has led the company’s educational and marketing initiatives since 2013. A Florida Atlantic University graduate with a bachelor’s degree in communications, Ashley specializes in community association education, digital outreach, and industry engagement for Florida HOAs and condominiums.
