City: Tampa Palms Homeowner Has Best Yard in Tampa

Tampa Palms resident Steve Toenes takes a lot of pride in his yard.

“In my opinion and to many others, it’s very nice looking,” said the Yardley Way resident.

Those “others” now include the city of Tampa. Toenes is the 2012 recipient of the Water Wise Landscape award in the residential category. He was honored during a City Council meeting last week.

Toenes’ yard is comprised of native, drought-tolerant plants, making it low maintenance and better for the environment.

“By grouping plants with similar water and maintenance needs, the use of
alternative mulches that are environmentally-friendly, creation of landscape
beds that serve to retain storm water runoff and creating great curb appeal,
it was definitely determined to be worthy!” the city wrote in a news release.

Toenes said two years ago he grew weary of trying to maintain his lawn of St. Augustine grass. He said it simply didn’t do well without “extensive maintenance care.”

So after delving into literature about Florida-friendly landscaping, he hired landscaper Shaun Sadree and got rid of it. No more grass. No more mowing. No more heavy reliance on fertilizer and pesticides. And his water bill would make anyone envious.

“Last month it was 16 dollars and a half,” Toenes said.

So what’s in Toenes’ yard if not grass? It includes red mulch, Japanese Boxwood shrubs, ilex schillings, green liriope and Asian jasmine, which forms the majority of the planting area and looks like grass from afar when it fills in.

Sadree said Toenes came to him after having done extensive research on his own, reading up and checking out many coffee table landscape books.

“Now his yard is in one of those books,” said Sadree, who submitted pictures of Toenes’ yard to a publisher out of China who is using the pictures.

Sadree said Toenes had been battling drought, “intense chinch bug activity” and high maintenance with his old St. Augustine yard. Now, it’s basically self-managed.

Sadree nominated Toenes’ landscape to the city for the Water Wise award.

“That one of my projects caught the attention of so many people, it’s very rewarding,” Sadree said.