Palm City Nursery

Pine Island Road cuts through the western side of Cape Coral, and for nearly forty years Palm City Nursery has been part of that corridor’s working landscape. Founded in 1987 by Benito Bernal Sr, the business has stayed family-owned since its earliest days, growing from a plant nursery into a fuller landscape design operation, though at its core the business is still built around a stocked retail and wholesale nursery.

The nursery specializes in tropical plants and palm trees, which makes sense for a Southwest Florida property. Palm City grows, delivers, and installs the kind of tropical landscaping that defines a Cape Coral yard, from statement palms to smaller tropical plantings, and the operation sells both retail, to homeowners stopping in for a specific plant, and wholesale, to landscapers and contractors buying in volume for larger jobs. That dual customer base is common among Cape Coral’s nursery operations, which serve both the do-it-yourself homeowner and the area’s active residential construction and landscaping trade.

Beyond plant sales, Palm City has expanded into a fuller landscaping service business over its history, adding tree removal, irrigation, fertilization, paving, and lighting services to its original nursery operation. For a homeowner planning a full yard renovation, that range of services means a single local company can supply the plants and also handle the installation and ongoing upkeep, rather than coordinating separately with a plant seller, an irrigation contractor, and a lighting installer.

Still, the retail nursery side remains an accessible entry point for anyone who just wants to walk the aisles and pick out a palm or a few tropical plantings for a weekend project. Cape Coral’s climate and canal-lined lots reward the kind of tropical landscaping Palm City specializes in, and a locally grown plant, adapted to the area’s heat, humidity, and sandy soil, often fares better long term than something trucked in from out of state.

Palm City Nursery is open Monday through Friday from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, with Saturday hours from 8 until 12:30, and is closed on Sundays. The Pine Island Road location sits in the southwestern part of Cape Coral, an area that has seen substantial new residential construction over the past two decades, keeping steady demand for a local nursery and landscaping company that understands the specific growing conditions of the region.

Now approaching four decades in business under the same family’s ownership, Palm City Nursery represents the kind of steady, generational small business that is easy to overlook amid Cape Coral’s newer retail development, but that has quietly supplied plants and landscaping know-how to the city’s homeowners since long before much of the surrounding development existed.