Three Generations of Florida Growing
Long before there was MonsteraEtc, there was a little girl wandering through what felt like a jungle in Southwest Florida.
My family's nursery story began with my grandparents, who operated a nursery in Estero, Florida, during the 1970s and ’80s. It wasn't the pristine greenhouse operation people might picture today. It was old Florida—palms, tropical foliage, trees and landscape plants arranged beneath oaks and palms, on pallets and throughout the existing landscape.
To me, it was a jungle.
The nursery later passed to my aunt and uncle, who continued the family's horticultural tradition with formal training of their own, earning horticultural degrees from the University of Florida and Florida State University. They continued the South Florida nursery operation until the late 1980s, when that chapter of our family's horticultural history came to an end.
I wasn't yet old enough to take it over.
So the third generation took a different route.
I also found my way to the University of Florida, although not to study horticulture. My academic path began in marine biology and ultimately led to medicine. But the fascination with plants, jungles, and the natural world that began in my grandparents' nursery never disappeared.
Eventually, the path circled back.
What began again as growing plants became collecting them, and collecting eventually became a private collection substantial enough to become MonsteraEtc—my own licensed Florida nursery and the third generation of our family's nursery story.
In retrospect, perhaps it isn't surprising that I ended up here.