Sanibel Roots in Resilience replants Causeway Boulevard natives

Sanibel has put the first stretch of its hurricane replanting in the ground along Causeway Boulevard, and the city says the species were chosen because they were the ones left standing after Ian and Milton

Money & World

The Editorial Team · August 27, 2026

Looking down on a single young plant with bright green compound leaves rising from a bed of coarse wood chip mulch, the mulch thrown out of focus behind it. No person, road, building, sign or lettering is in frame and nothing identifies a place. Stock photo, not a photograph of this event.

Stock photo

Stock photo. Not the actual scene. Photo: Steven May / Pexels

What it changes

Read the city's own funding sentence rather than the ribbon cutting, because it is the part that tells you what this is. Sanibel says the Causeway Boulevard planting was paid for by three things at once: donations to the Roots in Resilience fund, the City of Sanibel, and a grant awarded to the city by the United States Forest Service in partnership with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services through the Urban and Community Forestry Hurricane Ian Recovery Grant Program. That is a private fundraising drive, a municipal budget line and a federal disaster forestry grant stacked on one corridor, which is what municipal storm recovery in Southwest Florida now looks like four years on from Ian. No figure is attached to any of the three. The city has published none and this desk is not going to invent one. The grant programme is the piece worth understanding, because it is finite and it is not Sanibel's alone. The city's own notice on a separate project describes the same programme as covering 29 Florida counties hit by Ian, and describes that award as one of five made. A pot that size, spread across a disaster area that large, is not a standing budget for tree canopy. It is a one time recovery window, and the practical consequence for any city or county in Lee or Collier still holding a list of stripped corridors is that the money runs on the grant's clock rather than on the community's. What Sanibel has done that is worth copying is arrive at that window with a design, a contractor and a matching private fund already in place. Then there is the choice of plants, which is a resilience decision dressed as landscaping. The city says selection focused on species that showed resilience in the face of extreme hurricane force winds and storm surge, which is a different standard from what looks good on a gateway road. Ian and the 2024 storms ran that test for free across the whole island, and what the city is doing is reading the results and planting the survivors. Gumbo limbo, named in the report, is the local shorthand for exactly that: it is the tree that keeps standing and keeps coming back. Every one of these plants is going in on a corridor that will be hit again, and the difference between a canopy that survives the next storm and one that becomes debris is a real number on a future recovery bill, even though nobody prices it that way at planting time. The order of operations is also the point. The city says it worked with FEMA's Community Assistance program after Ian to identify vegetation needs along its main road corridors, and only then did the citizen group pick Causeway Boulevard as the first area, on the reasoning that it is the gateway. That is a sequence a property owner can borrow at a much smaller scale: establish what the storm actually killed, decide which frontage carries the most value, and plant the species that survived rather than the species that were there. For residents the near term news is narrow and worth knowing anyway. The first stretch is in the ground, the city says more project areas are planned elsewhere on the island, and the group takes donations. That is the whole of it. Nothing published says how much has been raised, how much remains, or which corridor is next.

The first stretch of Sanibel's hurricane replanting is in the ground. Native trees, shrubs and ground cover now line Causeway Boulevard from the City of Sanibel sign to the Periwinkle Way intersection, WINK News reported.

Leigh Gevelinger, the landscape architect on the work, described what the island lost:

"We lost a lot of canopy as a result of these Category Four and Five hurricanes that spun through the island."

Eric Jackson, the Sanibel public information officer, listed what has gone back in:

"Everything from, you know, the canopy that they're putting in, like the gumbo limbo here, down to the silver buttonwood. I mean, there's all kinds of ground cover that's put in."

WINK reports the effort is tied to Sanibel's 50th anniversary. The city's own notice on the project does not mention the anniversary, and that framing is the outlet's.

The City of Sanibel published its account of the work on 3 July, ahead of a 6 July start it expected to take three to four weeks. It describes Roots in Resilience as a citizen led initiative whose stated goal is to re-green, reforest and replant Sanibel with native trees and plants following the hurricanes of 2022 and 2024, which the city says severely impacted the island's plant and tree population. The group was initiated by Vice Mayor John Henshaw and is represented by Sanibel residents, the city, the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, the Charitable Foundation of the Islands, the Sanibel-Captiva Chamber of Commerce and Coastal Vista Design landscape architects.

The corridor was not picked at random. After Hurricane Ian, the city says, it worked with FEMA's Community Assistance program to identify vegetation needs and landscape enhancements along the island's main road corridors, and Roots in Resilience then selected Causeway Boulevard as the first project area because of its visibility as the gateway to the island. The city describes the work as running from the Causeway to the four way stop. Design was by Coastal Vista Design and installation by Juniper Landscaping.

On the plants themselves, the city is explicit about the standard it used. Selection focused on species that showed resilience in the face of extreme hurricane force winds and storm surge.

The funding came from three places: donations to the Roots in Resilience fund, the City of Sanibel, and a grant awarded to the city by the United States Forest Service in partnership with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, through the Urban and Community Forestry Hurricane Ian Recovery Grant Program. Neither the city nor the outlet has published a dollar figure for any of the three, or a total, and none is estimated here. No tree count for the corridor has been published either.

More Roots in Resilience projects are planned for other areas of the island, the city told WINK. Which corridor comes next has not been said.

Sanibel has put the first stretch of its hurricane replanting in the ground along Causeway Boulevard, and the city says the species were chosen because they were the ones left standing after Ian and Milton

Sanibel's planning commission has cleared the storm-damaged station at 1015 Periwinkle Way to reopen with a convenience store, and the city's own staff report shows the fuel pumps were never the part that needed a hearing

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