Plant aficionados know the drive: winding roads through Fort Myers’ rural Buckingham, palm trees dotting wide pastures, the creeping sense you’ve missed a turn. The reward is a five-acre botanical haven, home to Marée Farms’ tropical collection and Sincerely Succulents, where the region’s largest xerophyte trove thrives.
The succulent selection steals the show—dozens of varieties, from fanning paddle plants to various hanging beauties, including rarely seen variegated strings of hearts in 4-inch pots, densely packed burro’s tails and baskets of elephant bush trailing several feet. Marée Farms, by contrast, focuses on an array of bromeliads, rare hoyas and other standout tropicals, along with a striking collection of desert roses.
Every shadehouse, table and garden bed is staged to surprise: cliff cotyledons spilling with orange blooms, neon echeverias in perfect rosettes, ivory-splashed monsteras with dreamy variegation. Anchoring the nursery is Sincerely Succulent’s 800-square-foot shop, with a 12-foot-long potting bar where collectors compare notes and newcomers learn the ropes. “Plant people are the best people,” founder Shana Marée says of cultivating a community around modern gardening.
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Photography by Christina Bankson
sincerely succulents fort myers plant garden location
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Photography by Christina Bankson
sincerely succulents fort myers plant garden shelf
Spanning five acres in Buckingham, the site doubles as a living classroom, with demonstration gardens that highlight Florida’s subtropical advantages. Among the family’s specialties are rare aroids, including prized monstera albos (pictured below, right).
The family-run operation began almost by accident in 2020, when Shana’s in-laws, lifelong hobby gardeners Jill and Billy Marée, found themselves overrun by the bromeliads and desert roses they had propagated after moving to a sprawling, country home in Buckingham, about 25 minutes from Downtown Fort Myers. A driveway sale drew a crush of plant people, and Marée Farms was born.
Around the same time, their daughter-in-law, Shana, turned to succulents as her pandemic distraction. At her first wholesale nursery visit, she was so overwhelmed she “didn’t know where to start” and left with $2,000 in plants. The early chaos became her education. Soon, her passion spiraled into pop-ups, then demanded a permanent home. By 2023, the family had built the shop, along with shadehouses and demonstration gardens surrounding a lily pad-dotted lake.
Here, you won’t see trucks dropping off bar-coded pots, automated systems beeping with data or tired plants left to wilt on shelves. Everything is driven by devotion, a pastime grown into a way of life.
Photography by Christina Bankson
Photography by Christina Bankson
Photography by Christina Bankson
Photography by Christina Bankson
It’s a family effort. Billy and Shane (the Marées’ son and Shana’s husband) build all the structures, while Shana and Jill handle most of the merchandising. The women curate their stock by instinct, mix soils by hand and check every specimen daily, reading subtle cues in posture or color that automated systems may miss.
The difference shows in every pot: tree-like jade plants, with leaves thick as thumbs; jelly beans bursting with color; sharply striped zebra plants lined up like tiny soldiers—no browning leaf tips, no stretched stems in sight.
Shana now teaches others the lessons she once had to learn by trial: she pairs novices with hardy starter plants, coaches them on watering and arms them with confidence to graduate to architectural showpieces. “I won’t just sell somebody a plant to make a sale,” she says.
About 40% of the inventory is propagated on-site, with ‘mother plants’ sourced from sales and specialty farms across Florida and California. For the rare aroids, the Marées make trips to the grower’s farm, touring the rows by golf cart to hand-select the showiest picks, like Shana’s favored monstera albo, coveted for its white streaks. “I focus on unique things you can’t just go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and pick up,” she says. A loyal customer once asked for a caramel marble philodendron, a plant so prized that mature specimens can go for $1,000 or more. Shana found a tiny tissue culture—essentially a lab-grown seedling—and nurtured it for six months before it was large enough to clip and pass along. Today, she’s working up the nerve to take a cutting from the nearly 3-foot-tall plant’s few golden-leafed stems. She knows each one takes months to replace and, without proper lighting, the aroid may lose its singular variegation and revert to green. Each rare specimen tells a similar story of care, risk and patience.
Photography by Christina Bankson
sincerely succulents fort myers plant garden shana maree
In 2023, Shana Mareé opened her 800-square-foot studio and potting bar, Sincerely Succulents, on her in-laws’ farm. The space has become the heart of the nursery—a place to linger, learn and create living works of art.
The shop cat, Michael Phelps (a rescue they found in their swimming pool), hangs around the shop, parading in front of the imported, Spanish planters on the porch. Inside, vibrant pothos and philodendrons climb the walls around shelves lined with whimsical planters and locally made goods. The potting bar is central to the experience, giving visitors a space to craft terrariums, gather for events and swap tips with fellow gardeners.
Step outside, and the grounds double as a living classroom, with demonstration gardens showcasing bromeliads clustered around a giant fanning monstera and exotics tucked under oaks. The setting reminds us that Florida’s subtropical environment offers near-perfect conditions for plant obsession—even when the rain and humidity can be tough on succulents. Shana relies on a dryhouse to block rain while bathing xerophytes in light, so you can find an ever-changing spread year-round. Nearly every major family that can thrive in Florida is represented, with a vast range across any given species, from variegated to standard forms, young plants to mature specimens—all displayed for easy side-by-side comparison.
A sunny spot along the lake’s edge reveals a row of Jill’s potted desert roses. “We had a seed pod like this, and we opened it,” she says, holding what looks like a vanilla bean hanging from one of the shrub’s branches. “It had exactly 100 seeds. I started 100 of them, and all 100 popped up.” That kind of rare success rate has become routine here, patience and instinct transforming tiny beginnings into blooming ambitions.
Photography by Christina Bankson