The Landscape Show 2026: Inside the Orlando Floor With 23 Green Industry Companies

CrowdBoost covered The Landscape Show 2026 as media. The show ran August 19 to 21 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, it has been running since 1952, and it is the largest green industry trade show in the Southeast. We spent three days on the floor with a camera and a stack of business cards, and we came home with forty one contacts and a few hundred photographs.

This is what we saw. Twenty three companies, our own photographs, and an honest read on what the best booths were doing that the rest were not. If you exhibited and you are in here, the photo is yours to use.

Three Days on the Floor in Orlando

Tal Coley, CEO of FNGLA, framed the show before it opened: this is where the green industry comes to make decisions, and in three days you can see what is selling, what is changing, and who you need to be doing business with. That held up. The floor was Florida growers and wholesale nurseries shoulder to shoulder with equipment manufacturers, soil and fertilizer producers, landscape contractors, and the insurance and labor people who keep all of it running. Homestead, Williston, Arcadia, Clermont, Groveland, Belle Glade. Companies in from Wisconsin, Oregon, Georgia, Massachusetts, Texas and Ontario.

What struck us first was how much of the show is built rather than rented. Nurseries did not set up tables, they built gardens. A stone company carved an archway and made you walk through it. A sod company laid real turf. The material is the pitch, and the companies that understood that were the ones you remembered on the flight home.

The education program ran right on the floor rather than tucked into a side room, which meant the sessions pulled foot traffic instead of competing with it. Thursday alone carried five sessions on the Management track, on succession, workforce and taking control of your business.

The Companies We Covered at The Landscape Show 2026

Twenty three companies, one section each, every one of them photographed by us on the floor. Jump straight to a name or read it end to end.

Griffin Trees

Griffin Trees of Lake Placid put their phone number and email on a custom boulder, which is the product, and set it in a grove of palms, which is the other product. Two businesses, one sign, no confusion. They were also honest enough to hang a booth for sale placard on the stock, which is more useful to a buyer than another brochure.

Boulder Designs

The Boulder Designs franchise stand, run out of Waco, answered the only question a prospective franchisee actually has, which is what can I make and who will buy it. Engraved memorials, benches, entrance markers and corporate logos in stone, laid out so you can price the opportunity by looking at it. Franchise recruitment is closer to hiring than to selling, and this booth understood that.

Vina Planters

Vina Planters built their stand out of reclaimed wood shutters and corrugated metal and staffed it with two people who stood up. The planters are the product but the setting is the sell, because a buyer needs to picture the piece somewhere other than a warehouse shelf.

The Farmer’s Daughter

The Farmer’s Daughter brought a storefront to a wholesale hall, a scalloped awning with planters, garden accessories and apparel staged the way they would sit in a shop. For garden centers walking the floor and wondering what to put next to the register, it is a working answer rather than a catalog page.

A scalloped awning, planters, accessories and apparel staged like a shop floor rather than a catalog page. The Farmer’s Daughter gave every garden center walking that aisle a picture of what a finished display actually looks like, which is a far better sale than a price list. That merchandising instinct is the whole business, and it shows.

Bloom-Masters Wholesale Nursery

Bloom-Masters came out of Oviedo, about twenty minutes from the convention center, and built the single most photographed structure in their aisle: a full archway of coleus in red, white and blue with a flowerbed running out from it like a carpet. It is a nursery proving it can grow, which is exactly the right argument for a wholesale buyer to walk into.

CapStone

CapStone, which cuts natural Florida cap rock out of Okeechobee, built a limestone arch and made the entrance to their booth the demonstration. You cannot walk through it without understanding what they sell and what it looks like installed. It was the most confident piece of booth design at the show, and it cost them nothing in explanation.

Marian Gardens Tree Farm

Marian Gardens out of Groveland has grown container trees for more than thirty years, and they lead with the part nobody can see. The sign says high quality root systems, and the booth was built around photographs of the stock in the ground. For a product where the difference is real but invisible in a catalog, that is the right instinct.

Soil Moist

Soil Moist, made by JRM Chemical, put a number on the box, reduces plant waterings by fifty percent, and then merchandised the range like a retail endcap so you could see the whole line at a glance. A specific claim beats a vague benefit every time, and in Florida in August that particular claim sells itself.

PalmCo

PalmCo grows palms and non-invasive clumping bamboo out of Bokeelia on Pine Island, and rather than explain that, they planted it. You walked into a stand of mature bamboo and found the sign inside. The positioning line, the place for palms and bamboo, is short enough to remember and specific enough to be useful.

Neptune’s Harvest

Neptune’s Harvest came the farthest of anyone we photographed, down from Gloucester, Massachusetts, and they carry the best origin story on the floor. The fertilizer is made from North Atlantic fish caught and processed on the Gloucester docks, as a division of a seafood company that goes back to 1965. That is not a spec sheet, that is a story, and stories are what people still repeat three months after a show.

Buckhorn Nursery

Buckhorn Nursery had the best piece of writing on the floor. Their sign describes a four generation Lambert family legacy and finishes with a line about breathing in dirt and exhaling flowers. Four generations is the kind of proof a competitor cannot buy, and most companies that have it never say it out loud.

Action Sod

Action Sod of Miami built the smartest booth at The Landscape Show 2026. Forty years in business, 1987 to 2026, told as a row of telephones: rotary dial, brick cell phone, flip phone, smartphone, each with a card explaining how the industry changed when that device arrived. A rotary phone sat on the counter for people to pick up. It is a company history that doubles as an industry history, and it gave every passerby a reason to stop, touch something and start talking. That is what a trade show booth is for.

New Shoots Bamboo Nursery

New Shoots out of Stuart narrowed all the way down to non-invasive clumping bamboo, and the narrowing is the strategy. In a hall with hundreds of growers selling overlapping inventory, the company that owns one category is the one that gets called when somebody needs that category.

French Drain Man

French Drain Man came down from Almont, Michigan and had people in the booth every time we walked past, and the reason was on the table: coils of pipe you could pick up, a product timeline running 2017 to 2023, and a line pointing at their YouTube channel. They built an audience before the show and the show was where that audience came to shake hands. Yard drainage done right, made in the USA, nothing wasted.

Urra’s Nursery

Urra’s Nursery has been growing in the Redland region south of Miami since 1983, and brought a clean, well stocked stand of tropicals and color. Their sales manager worked the aisle rather than the chair, which sounds small and is not.

Groundworks

Groundworks came in on forty years of certified Medjool date palms and brought something we had not seen before: a printed customer bill of rights, ten commitments covering inspection, refunds and honesty, hanging in the booth where anybody could read it. Putting your standards in writing in public is a real competitive move, and almost nobody does it.

Straightline Tree Farm

Straightline Tree Farm in Clermont grows across forty acres, and their banner did something most banners do not: it told you exactly what is on the farm. Oaks, magnolias, crape myrtles, palms. A specifier reading that knows in four seconds whether to keep walking, which is the whole job of a trade show banner.

LiQuiTube

LiQuiTube sells tire sealant, which is a hard thing to make interesting, so they photographed the machines instead: skid steers, dump trucks, chippers, boom lifts. Every image answers the real question, which is whether it works on the equipment you actually own. Sell the outcome, not the fluid.

Grant’s Farm Nursery

Grant’s Farm Nursery came up from Davie with color, a bank of bromeliads in reds, pinks and oranges under a black pergola, and lit the whole thing with a neon sign. It was the only neon on the floor. In a hall of green and blue carpet, that is how you get found from three aisles away.

The Sod Lot

The Sod Lot ran the cleanest message at the show. Quality grass cut fresh daily, four grass types listed underneath, and a booth floored in the actual product. Sod is a commodity until somebody makes freshness the argument, and that is the whole positioning in six words.

The Magnolia Company

The Magnolia Company of Pierson built a room rather than a booth, hardwood floor, a painted door, a console table and magnolia wreaths and garland on every wall. It reads like a home, which is the point, because that is where the product ends up. Retail-minded merchandising in a wholesale hall stands out immediately.

VAS Agricultural Supply

VAS Agricultural Supply of Miami carries the unglamorous middle of this industry, the fertilizers, chemicals and irrigation supplies, and they solved the visibility problem with a pair of balloon topiaries in greens, golds and oranges. It is a distribution booth that reads as a garden from a distance. Simple, cheap, effective.

Apex Growers

Apex Growers parked a vintage pickup in the middle of their stand and planted around it. It photographs beautifully, which matters more than it sounds: a booth that photographs well gives every attendee who walks past a reason to post it, and that is free reach from a fixed cost you were already paying.

What the Floor Told Us About Green Industry Marketing

Forty one business cards came home with us. A business card is a company’s marketing in miniature, because somebody had to decide what mattered enough to print, and three patterns showed up often enough that they stopped being coincidence. We are describing these without names, because the point is the pattern and not the company.

The card with no website on it

More than a few cards had no web address at all. Name, phone, email, sometimes a street address, nothing else. For a wholesale nursery that is not automatically a crisis, because wholesale runs on relationships and a grower with thirty years of buyers on speed dial does not lie awake worrying about search rankings.

But relationships retire. Buyers change companies. Landscape architects specify plants for projects in counties they have never worked before. When any of those people go looking for a new grower, they do what everyone does now, which is search. A nursery with no web presence is invisible in exactly that moment, even when the product is better than the operation three booths down. The card tells you the relationships are working. It does not tell you what happens when they stop.

The free email address

Gmail, Yahoo, and one card carrying a cs.com address that has been in service longer than some of our team has been alive. There are two costs here and neither one is obvious.

The first is trust. A buyer comparing two quotes gives a half second of doubt to the one that arrived from a free inbox, and half a second is enough. The second is the expensive one: deliverability. Mail sent from a free account cannot be authenticated the way a message from your own domain can, which means quotes, invoices and availability lists are far more likely to land in a spam folder than in front of the person who asked for them. Companies lose real orders this way and never learn that it happened. Domain email with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured properly is roughly a one day fix, and it is the cheapest marketing work a business can do.

One company, two brands, half the budget

Several cards carried two businesses. A nursery on one side and an equipment distributorship on the other. A distributor representing three manufacturer brands with no clear answer for which one the company itself is. There is nothing wrong with running two businesses. The problem is running them on one marketing budget and hoping both get found: two domains, two audiences, two sets of keywords, half the attention to each, and usually neither one ranks. The fix is rarely to shut one down. It is to decide which brand leads, give that one the website and the search work it deserves, and let the second live where it actually belongs.

What AI Search Changes for a Grower or a Nursery

Here is the part that moved while the industry was busy growing things. In July 2026, Yelp and OpenAI signed an agreement that puts Yelp reviews, ratings and photos inside ChatGPT. That is one deal among many and the direction is what matters. A growing share of the question who is a good wholesale tree grower in Central Florida now gets answered before anyone sees a page of blue links, and the answer is assembled out of whatever credible, structured information about your business happens to exist in public.

For a company with no website, this is not a new problem. It is the same problem with a shorter runway. You were already hard to find on Google. Now you are also absent from the systems that are quietly taking over a growing slice of the buying process, and both doors close at the same time.

The work that fixes it is not exotic. A real site with clear pages about what you grow and who you serve. A complete, accurate Google Business Profile. Consistent listings across the directories that matter in your category. Reviews from actual customers. Content that answers the questions buyers are already asking, written so a person and a machine can both follow it. That is the same foundation that has worked for fifteen years, which is the good news. What has changed is the urgency, and the fact that search work now has to satisfy answer engines as well as search engines.

What We Would Tell Anyone Exhibiting at The Landscape Show Next August

Put a website on the card. If there is nothing to print, that is the first project on the list, not the fifth. A simple, fast, honest site that says what you grow and who you sell to will outperform nothing at all by an enormous margin. Start with a free website audit if you want to know where you actually stand.

Move off the free email address. Domain email, authenticated properly, done before the show rather than after it. Every quote you send from the floor should actually arrive.

Pick the brand that leads. If you run two businesses, decide which one carries the marketing and give it a real shot instead of splitting one budget into two halves that each accomplish nothing.

Build something people can walk into. The booths we remembered were rooms, arches and gardens, not tables. CapStone made you walk through the product. Action Sod gave you a rotary phone to pick up. Bloom-Masters built an arch you had to photograph. None of that requires the biggest budget in the hall, it requires deciding what the booth is supposed to do.

Shoot the product while it looks its best. A show is the one week a year when the inventory is staged, the equipment is clean and the booth is lit. Bring a camera or bring someone who knows how to use one. You will use those images for the next two years.

Write the story down before you forget it. Founding year, the family, the process, the thing you do differently that customers never hear about. Buckhorn Nursery has four generations on a sign. Groundworks has forty years and a bill of rights. Ten minutes with a notepad becomes an About page that actually convinces someone.

Follow up inside a week. This is the one everybody knows and almost nobody does. We wrote all forty one of our follow-ups within days of getting home, each one referencing something specific to that conversation. The response rate on that is not close to what a generic great meeting you earns.

Orlando was one of two conferences our team covered this August. A week earlier we were in South Lake Tahoe for ARPOC 2026, the Annual Reserve Peace Officers Conference, where we ran the promotion, photography and video for the California Reserve Peace Officers Association.

Frequently Asked Questions

When and where is The Landscape Show?

The Landscape Show 2026 ran August 19 to 21, 2026 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. It is produced by FNGLA, the Florida Nursery, Growers and Landscape Association, has been held since 1952, and is the largest green industry trade show in the Southeast. The next show, The Landscape Show 2027, is set for August 18 to 20, 2027 at the same venue.

How big is The Landscape Show?

According to FNGLA’s official show site, The Landscape Show brings in more than 7,000 industry professionals and over 400 exhibiting companies across more than 250,000 square feet of show floor, with 30 plus education sessions through its Knowledge College.

Who attends The Landscape Show?

Landscapers, growers and nurseries, garden centers, lawn care and irrigation professionals, rewholesalers and brokers, municipalities, landscape architects, and resort and hospitality buyers. It is a buying show, which is why the companies that photograph well and follow up fast win an outsized share of the business that happens after the floor closes.

Is a website really worth it for a wholesale nursery that sells on relationships?

Yes, and the relationships are the reason rather than the counterargument. Your existing buyers already know you. The site is for the buyer who does not: the landscape architect specifying for a project two counties over, the new purchasing manager at an account you have held for twenty years. A website does not replace a relationship. It is how the next one starts.

How long does local SEO take to work for a green industry business?

Most businesses see measurable movement in three to six months and meaningful inquiry volume somewhere in the six to twelve month range. Green industry markets outside the major metros are often less competitive than a category like home services, so early wins can come faster than that. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is selling something other than SEO. We lay out what to expect month by month in How Long Does SEO Take to Work?

What should a grower do with trade show business cards after the show?

Sort them the day you get home, while you still remember the conversations. Separate the people you actually talked with from the ones you simply collected, because those two groups need different emails. Write each follow-up to the person, referencing something real from the exchange. Then get every card into whatever system you use to track contacts, so a piece of cardstock is not the only copy of that relationship.

Do green industry companies need to worry about AI search if they sell business to business?

Yes. Buyers research the same way whether they are buying for themselves or for a company. A B2B buyer asking an AI assistant to shortlist suppliers is doing exactly what a consumer does, and that shortlist gets built from the information publicly available about you. If the information is thin, you are not on the list.

More Frames From the Orlando Floor

Fourteen more from the three days, full frames, nothing cropped. If your booth is in one of these and you want the full resolution file, say the word and it is yours.

Take Your Booth Photo. It Is Yours.

If your company is in this piece, the photograph is yours. Use it on your site, your social, your follow-up emails, wherever it helps. No credit required and nothing attached to it.

CrowdBoost is a full service marketing agency and the green industry is one of the markets we know best: websites, search, photography and video, branding, and the unglamorous foundation work like domain email that quietly decides whether your quotes ever get read. If you want a straight answer about where your business stands online right now, get in touch with the CrowdBoost team and we will take a look and tell you exactly what we see.

About the author. Perry Aston is CEO of CrowdBoost Marketing, a full service marketing agency in Burbank, California, and a guest lecturer on marketing and AI at USC. CrowdBoost has been doing marketing since 2006 and has won six awards: Best of Burbank from myBurbank in 2025 and 2026, Best of Burbank from Business Rate in 2025 and 2026, Small Business of the Year from the United Chambers of the San Fernando Valley, and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce Ambassador of the Year for 2026.