Behind the Scenes, Yet Front and Center

Stephen Jurek explains the unique role he and his team play.

When there’s a big project in the Garden, you can bet that you’ll find the four-member Horticulture Maintenance Team at the center of it. The job can be intense, requiring anything from moving dozens of 50-foot rare palms to installing expansive outdoor exhibitions. Stephen Jurek, Associate Director of Horticulture Maintenance, a lifelong Naples resident who has worked for the Garden going on 13 years, thrives in this setting. And it’s a good thing. Between placing more than 15 large trees at the Evenstad Horticulture Campus and finding homes for more than a dozen rare palms in the Garden, it’s been a busy season.

The most comfortable for me is when we’re in the middle of 50 million things going on that all needed to happen yesterday. I like the chaos of a big project; it keeps pushing you. When we open our shop doors in the morning, we can look out and see all this hard work, this beautiful landscape that we planted ourselves.

We are the Horticulture Maintenance Team; we always have some sort of project going on, and we run machinery almost every day. Whether it’s a chain saw, telehandler forklift, a mower, a tractor; we’re always using something. We shovel as well; there’s a lot of shoveling. For tree moves, if we are able to use an excavator, it will take us an hour or two to get it out of the ground, three to four hours total to get it moved and planted. If not, it’s a day per tree. That’s the deciding factor.

“The team I have is just truly amazing at what they do, and I can tell that every single one of them loves their job. Anything that needs to get done, they do it with smiles on their faces. None of what we’re able to pull off is even possible without them.”
— Stephen Jurek

Any major renovation beyond electrical and building and concrete, any install — the Dinosaurs exhibitions, (2015, 2018), both Legos installs (2014, 2016), Origami in the Garden (2016 – 2017); the Fräbel glass sculptures (Reflections on Glass: Fräbel in the Garden, 2018 – 2019) — we’ve had our hands in it. That’s something that has helped me get better at my job is that not every install is the same; there’s a different way to pick up a sculpture than there is a sabal palm. Every install that we’ve had in the Garden has been (managed by) us, Operations, and Exhibitions. We are lucky enough to be able to do it ourselves.

The Martin Foundation (palm donation) has been one of the standout fun projects we’ve gotten to do in a long time. It unwrapped a hidden love of palms that I didn’t know I had.

The first half of the palms came in about a week or two before Hurricane Ian. We went over to the gentleman’s house in Miami where the palms came from, to see the property a little bit, get a feel for the trees. You can see a palm tree in the ground and think, that’s a huge palm tree, but when you see a single palm tree with a root ball that’s eight feet wide, that puts it into perspective.

We are not just moving tiny palms from a nursery. This thing is 40 feet long with a 5-foot-long root ball. We got different species of palms the second time around this summer, and it just reinforced the fact that I love palm trees.

It’s cliché, but every day is different for us, truly. It’s instant gratification what we do. If we put in 10 rocks in a day and a palm tree, that area goes from nothing to instant landscape.

The STICKWORK install we did (2021 – 2023), the Tobin install we did (Steve Tobin: Nature Underground, 2020 – 2021), all of the Garden face-lifts are something guests get to experience. We block off an area, and the guests are there; they get to see it as it’s happening. When we were expanding the Foster Succulent Garden, there were guests all around watching us put in those giant boulders. We’re front and center, but we’re not front and center.

There’s a joke that our team has when we’re moving a big tree or we’re doing a large install: “Oh, it’s just another day at the office.” That’s our viewpoint — it’s just another day.

This article first appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Cultivate, the Garden’s magazine.

About the Author

Stephen Jurek is the Garden’s Associate Director of Horticulture Maintenance.