Tropical careers take root at the Naples Botanical Garden
5 – minute read
The Naples Botanical Garden celebrated the grand opening of its Evenstad Horticulture Campus in 2024. Described by Brian Galligan, vice president of horticulture, as the garden’s biggest undertaking in a decade, it replaces a previous setup split across three buildings using “duct tape, zip ties, rusty metal and makeshift everything.”
For three Florida Gulf Coast University alums, the Evenstad Horticulture Campus is now their professional home — and a place where their FGCU education intersects with cutting-edge tropical horticulture.
A growing opportunity
The campus boasts over 60,000 square feet of growing space — slightly larger than a football field. It includes multiple greenhouses, a sun nursery and a laboratory. It’s one of the nation’s only specialty tropical growing operations — crucial because the garden is one of the few places in the continental U.S. where tropical and subtropical plants can be enjoyed year-round outdoors, according to Galligan.
“We’re tropical. No one else can grow a lot of the things that we can grow,” he says. “So really it’s expected of us to be growing these oddball things from around the world that have amazing conservation merit.”
The new facility greatly expands the garden’s capacity to accept and preserve seeds from across the globe as well as from its own backyard and to cultivate plants from them. Staffing the new campus has garden managers looking at Southwest Florida’s regional university, FGCU.
“This really provides a pretty neat opportunity for additional students in the future,” says Nick Ewy, director of collections at the Naples Botanical Garden.
While the future looks good for Eagles to find employment at the garden, the horticulture center currently employs three FGCU alums — Andrea Grace, Emily Rodriguez and Shelby Dotson.
Meet the Eagles
In 2010, an FGCU professor informed Grace (’11, environmental studies with a biology minor) and her classmates about a part-time job posting at the Naples Botanical Garden. Getting that position led to Grace’s full-time role as adult education manager. Now she serves as assistant director of horticulture and leads a team of 11 staff, including gardeners, plant health lead and administrative support.
“A lot of our interns come from FGCU — and that experience has been fantastic,” she says.
One of those interns was recent graduate Rodriguez (’25, environmental studies). She also took some of her FGCU classes in the Kapnick Center at the garden, including plant ecology with Jeanine Richards and wetland ecology with Brian Bovard.
“That really opened up my world to the botanical gardens and the research and work that they actually do,” Rodriguez says.
As an undergrad, she hand-pollinated netted pawpaw, a flowering shrub native to Florida, for a research project with Richards, Bovard and garden staff. Her coursework and research led to a summer internship and then a full-time position as a nursery specialist after graduation.
As part of the conservation work her team does, they recently received cacti cuttings from 15 species in Puerto Rico threatened by pests. Part of her job is figuring out what these plants need to thrive, especially since they’re not native to Florida. She says it’s like “solving a puzzle” — learning which soil mix and conditions will work best for the plant.
“We keep them here as a reservoir of genetic material, so that hopefully when the pest problem is solved over there, they can be reintroduced,” Rodriguez says.
“Aside from cacti, we also have endangered trees from Costa Rica and a lot of our own native and rare plants — which are my favorite. I’m a native Floridian, so they’re close to my heart.”
Rodriguez’s classmate Shelby Dotson is also one of the newest employees at the Evenstad Horticulture Campus. Dotson (’25, environmental studies with a double minor in climate change and agribusiness) was a student garden leader at the South Village dining hall food garden, where she oversaw plant care and created educational materials for chefs and students. After graduation, she transitioned from part-time to a full-time nursery gardener.
“They posted the job in February, and I was, like, I have to apply, right?”
She says her role boils down to “watering, repotting, weeding and making sure the plants are thriving.”
She learned about soil health in a gardening class held in the FGCU Food Forest. “All the things that go into soil — the drainage, the water-holding capacity, nutrients — all that good stuff. I definitely use that information here.”
A living lab for lifelong learners
For Ewy and Galligan, FGCU offers a pipeline of students to the Naples Botanical Garden and its new horticulture campus.
“We’ve always used students for internships and filling volunteer needs. But I think going forward is going to be a lot more hands-on approaches, getting actual trials and collecting data,” Galligan says.
“Nobody comes into this knowing everything,” Ewy says. “It’s a lifetime of learning. Brian and I have been doing it our whole lives, and still we’re learning stuff every day.”
With its emphasis on conservation and opportunity for hands-on learning, the Evenstad Horticulture Campus serves as a living laboratory for FGCU students. As more Eagles discover their passions through internships, service-learning and class projects at the garden, the future of tropical horticulture will have its roots in Southwest Florida.
