Evanstad Horticultural Campus at Naples Botanical Garden

Naples, FL

The Evenstad Horticulture Campus is a new growing facility at Naples Botanical Garden that supports the Garden’s mission of developing nature-based environmental solutions, expanding its tropical plant collections, and enhancing 170 acres of cultivated gardens and native habitat. The campus features a state-of-the-art greenhouse complex comprised of a 10,000-square-foot shade house, a 4,300-square-foot propagation house, two connected greenhouses totaling 6,400 square feet, and a 1,000-square-foot potting house. These specialized structures provide controlled environments to grow and care for a vast array of tropical and subtropical plants, ensuring the Garden can propagate rare species and intensify conservation efforts on-site.

In addition to the core growing houses, the project includes a pre-engineered metal building that serves as an office and maintenance shop for horticultural staff, as well as an open-air sun nursery for acclimating plants to the outdoors. An advanced water management system was installed to support sustainable operations: several buildings are outfitted with rainwater collection tanks that feed into a new reverse osmosis treatment system, which purifies recycled rainwater for irrigation use throughout the campus. The campus also houses the Garden’s seed bank – an archive of over 200,000 seeds from Southwest Florida and the Caribbean – providing secure, climate-controlled storage for seeds used in habitat restoration projects and long-term genetic preservation of plant species. By significantly increasing growing capacity and resource efficiency, the Evenstad Horticulture Campus serves as a regional hub for plant science and conservation, strengthening the Garden’s role in protecting tropical flora and educating the community about sustainable horticulture. The project was designed by PK Studios.