Bay park’s expert explains ‘right plants in the right place’ approach.
By Gretchen Cochran
Original Air Date: June 27, 2025
Host: Remember the wilted grass, bushes and trees after the flooding during last year’s storm season? Our reporter Gretchen Cochran talked to an expert on how to prepare local waterfront parks—and your yard—for the next floods.
Gretchen Cochran: For months, we’ve been wondering about the ground surrounding the focal point of one of Sarasota’s most talked-about big decisions coming soon. And we found just the person to help us.
Sean Patton
Next week, the study committee pondering the future of the Van Wezel is expected to deliver its recommendations to the Sarasota Commissioners. The media will be all over it, and righty so. A lot of money is involved—maybe $17 million—to stabilize the 50-some-year-old building.
Since there’s just so much money the taxpayers will support, commissioners will be asking themselves: If they set aside the money for Van Wezel, will there be enough cash and political capital to also support a new performing arts center costing the city about $200 million?
We asked 31-year-old Sean Patton what he thought about the issue. He had clear opinions on the performing arts center.
Sean Patton: Sarasota bleeds young talent. We bleed young people. The number one reason, about tied with affordable housing, that young people are leaving Sarasota, is that there is no culture here for them. We love our snowbirds, don’t get me wrong, but if you want to make a career in Sarasota as a young person, you need nightlife. You need youth. We want to go see concerts and festivals, and the Van Wezel can fit, I think, 2,500 people, and that’s the biggest venue in Sarasota. How are we going to have concerts and things? How are we going to have big cultural shows if the biggest venue in Sarasota is 2,500 people? So I’m very happy to support a larger performing arts center.
GC: But we talked to Sean not because of the performing arts. He’s a New College graduate and now adjunct professor in marine biology. Native plants are his issue. He has his own company called Stocking Savvy which contracts for large orders of them. He also works at the Bay, the 53-acre park in development around the Van Wezel and the possible site of a new performing arts center.
Since he is helping the Bay create landscaping that is hurricane and salt water resistant, we asked him for landscaping advice.
“Plant native trees,” he said, sneering about Norfolk Island Pines. Southern live oaks are natives and much more hardy, he said. Mangroves and buttonwood trees are the really salt-tolerant ones.
Before proceeding, he took off on grassy lawns.
SP: It’s boring! It sucks to look at! It’s just the same clump of grass over and over or it’s the same southern live oak. I don’t want to be bored in Sarasota. I want to live here a long time, and I want it to be fun. To make it fun is sometimes a little more expensive. We need more flowers. We need more tree variety. But we’re figuring out ways to do that. I honestly think lawns are ugly. I think lawns suck. I’m a millennial who wants to play video games. I have better things to do than mow.
GC: So, we get that. No grass. He’s a believer in a policy called “Right Plant, Right Place.” Figure what you want, then look up the Florida Native Plant Society for guidance. Every option you’d get from that big box store, there are three better options from the plant society. So make a plan.
Then go shopping. Sean recommended checking the Florida Association of Native Nurseries for a directory. Closest to us in Sarasota and Bradenton are Florida Native Plants at the east end of Fruitville Road and the Sweet Bay Nursery in Parrish, where they have 500 species of native plants. See what the plants look like in nature before you put them in, he advised.
He likes American canna lilies for salt tolerance and hibiscus grandiflora, with a pink flower bigger than your head. They are experimenting with various species at The Bay and creating a seed bank for a dependable source in the future.
Then he launched into his dream for Sarasota. You would call him a plant guy, but his vision is much broader. We asked him where his passion comes from. Here’s what he said:
SP: We are the children of humanity. We can do and design anything. Every single problem on Earth caused by humans can be fixed by them. We fixed the hole in the ozone layer, and that sounds way more [made-up?] than climate change. Climate change is simply, we’re burning a bunch of stuff heating up the world. We can fix it. And one of the biggest ways we can do that is what I call living infrastructure or living architecture.
The Bay Park, Selby Gardens, Quay Commons are all examples in Sarasota of buildings and areas designed to maximize green space. The more you put this in, the cooler the area looks. I’m not talking about bringing Sarasota out and sprawling halfway across the state into swamps and floodplains and causing all these issues. I’m talking about making a city so cool that it puts Sarasota on the map, and the Bay Park is one of those big initial steps.
GC: If he doesn’t like grass, he hates pavement.
SP: Whose idiot idea was it to allow building in flood plains? That got legalized, I think in 2013, 2014—the ability to build houses on floodplains. Do you know what floodplains do? It’s in the name! Now we’re building all these single-family houses in flood plains, and people are like, “Well, why is everything flooding?” when we should be working on making the city not have as much stormwater.
The easy way to do that is plant. If you have a one-inch rainstorm on an acre of plants, you have one inch of rain. However, if you pave half that area, that one-inch rain is now a two-inch rain because all the water runs off the pavement and into those planted areas. We need to start thinking differently, and the Bay Park is a great part of that. We’re removing almost 100 acres of parking lots in downtown Sarasota. We’re spending millions of dollars an acre on land in downtown Sarasota, and most of it’s parking. By getting rid of these parking lots and putting in other ways for people to get around and other cool stuff, it makes the whole city better.
GC: This is Gretchen Cochran, reporting for WSLR.
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