A tribute to Sally McConnell, our inaugural supporter
Photo: Sally McConnell hugging her oak tree at her last residence in a retirement community in St. Petersburg, Florida. This retired public school teacher gave her all for her community of people, plants and animals.
Sally Marie McConnell, 1934-2026
Our inaugural supporter, Sally McConnell, gave us and many other organizations enormous financial support for several years. Equally important, she was always encouraging and supportive, believing in us long before we could even begin to figure out how to effectively pursue our mission. A petite, quiet and unassuming woman, Sally would have been easily overlooked by most people, but she was smart, funny, and focused, to all of our benefit.
Sally came to us through her community garden center, Wilcox Nursery & Landscape in Largo, Florida, where she got the native plants and help she needed to transform her conventional and very urban St. Petersburg yard into a habitat humming with pollinators, birds, and the occasional bunny. Sally's house was modest but on the water, and her initial interest had been to see some flowers and conserve her local watershed. Soon she was spending her mornings outside, drinking her coffee while watching all the newly arrived wildlife enjoying her plants.
Sally herself had once considered a career in horticulture, but the path had been unclear, and she instead pursued teaching, a more obvious route, particularly for a woman of her time. Along the way, she was exposed to Apple Corporation in its early days of development, attending a conference for educators where co-founder Steve Wozniak described the vision they had for Apple and how Apple planned to introduce its computers into public school systems everywhere.
Sally used her schoolteacher income to purchase some the first Apple stock shares offered to the public, an incredibly fortunate decision that created a great deal of wealth that she continued to cultivate, just like she later would her plants. Sally educated herself about the stock market, subscribing to Investor's Business Daily and steadily building wealth that she would later use to start and sustain a long list of charitable endeavors in the arts, theater, education, children and nature.
Sally never lost energy for working on worthwhile causes. In her eighties, Sally began to pay a pivotal role in environmental conservation in Pinellas County, Florida, using her own own funds to begin a community matching gift campaign that ultimately led to the county purchasing a rare 14-acre slice of scrub habitat, saving it from development as a condominium, and providing one of the very few places where gopher tortoises and other threatened creatures and plants can thrive. This relatively small parcel, now known as the West Klosterman Preserve, is incredibly important in this most densely developed county in Florida.
Sally recognized how vitally important local native nurseries are to the community, and how fragile they can be as small enterprises. One day she asked then owner Bruce Turley what she could do to help businesses like Wilcox, and encourage the many young people who were working there to continue working with native plants. This led to several conversations about the challenges faced by native plant growers, small businesses and young people with limited resources.
Ultimately, the Florida Association of Native Nurseries (FANN) decided to create a public charity that could help harness public interest in native plants to expand and strengthen the native plant industry. Sally enthusiastically endorsed this effort and every year, contributed generously to make sure our newly minted "Native Plant Horticulture Foundation" could build a strong base from which to grow.
Our organization and so many are both indebted to Sally and so deeply inspired by her generosity, humility and modest lifestyle, a real comfort in an often crazy world. Thank you, Sally, so much. We will miss you, but we will work hard to make you proud and, of course, to create a great return on your investment in us.
More about Sally in this obituary, as published in the Tampa Bay Times, August 9, 2026.
You can honor Sally's legacy today with a donation in her memory.
