A Tribute to Sally

Our inaugural supporter, Sally McConnell, gave us and many other organizations enormous financial support for several years. Equally important, Sally 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 rabbit. 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 enjoy 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 of 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 as she later would cultivate 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, in Florida and other states.

Sally never lost energy for working on worthwhile causes. In her late eighties, she began to play 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 their local community, and how fragile they can be as small enterprises. One day she asked Bruce Turley, at that time the owner of Wilcox, what she could do to help native plant enterprises like Wilcox, and support the many young people who were working there, so they would be encouraged 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.

Bruce was also serving on the board of the Florida Association of Native Nurseries (FANN) and ultimately, 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 Foundation and so many other organizations and individuals are 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 very 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.

The native plant industry is about where the organic foods industry was perhaps back in the 1960s, and must continue to mature, innovate, and develop the next generation of leaders who can address the education, marketing, distribution and entrepeneurial challenges that hold it back today. Growing and using native plants in ecological landscaping represents a fundamental shift in how society lives in its urban spaces. With the passion and support of people like Sally, we can achieve true sustainability, together.

Honor and sustain Sally's legacy today with a donation in her memory.

Sally was first inspired to "go native" when she read a small newspaper announcement about a Native Plant Landscape Tour being held by the local Pinellas Chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society (circa 2010). She took the tour and was introduced, in her words, to the "wonderful world of natives" by the home owners, chapter volunteers and designers from Wilcox Nursery. The whole experience left her feeling alive and rejuvenated and full of purpose. She returned home and resolved to make major changes to her yard, gave Wilcox a call and began the transformation. The designers wisely advised her to begin working in phases, improving one area at a time, so she could gain confidence and familiarity with the plants. But soon after the first couple of enhancements, Sally was eager to make major changes, and moved to completely redo the backyard, which fronted an inland waterway and had erosion problems, and to continue enhancing and updating the front and side yards. She also worked with Wilcox to train a number of young designers and garden maintenance professionals, an invaluable effort that helped start more new native plant businesses in the region.

Sally's first priority was dealing with erosion of her turfgrass along the seawall. Many older Florida communities along waterways have seawalls that result in land erosion and a loss of natural shoreline and habitat. Turfgrass compounds the loss. Unfortunately, undoing seawall structures is legislatively complex, costly and often downright impossible. Sally replaced the eroding turf with a variety of small native shrubs and groundcovers that provided abundant hiding and feeding areas for small creatures, including insects, which in turn attracted more birds. She loved watching her Sea Purslane cascade over the seawall and sway with the incoming and outgoing waves.

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A tribute to Sally McConnell, our inaugural supporter and champion native plant enthusiast

Sally Marie McConnell, 1934-2026

Scenes from Sally's Yard

Native Plant Horticulture Foundation