The Coral Nursery Behind the Hedge on Overseas Highway Just Ran Out of Money to Finish the Job
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Drive the Overseas Highway past mile marker 25 and you'll pass a wall of sea grape and buttonwood thick enough to block any view of what's behind it. Most people assume it's a private compound, maybe a boat storage yard, and keep driving toward the bridge. What's actually behind that hedge is a working coral farm that has spent the past several months becoming one of the largest land-based coral nurseries in the state, then watched the state cut off the money meant to put its product back in the ocean.
The address is 23801 Overseas Highway. The facility is Summerland Farms, home base for the Plant A Million Corals Foundation, and if you've lived on this key for any length of time without knowing it's there, you're not alone. It's also free to walk into.
Plant A Million Corals uses a technique called micro-fragmentation, developed by the foundation's founder Dr. David Vaughan, that cuts coral into small pieces to trigger faster growth. The fragments grow 25 to 40 times faster than they would left alone on the reef. Instead of waiting decades for a colony to reach a useful size, the nursery can produce transplant-ready coral in a fraction of the time, using custom flow-through saltwater systems that pull seawater through the tanks and hold temperature and salinity steady while the reef outside swings with every heat wave and cold front.
Before this year's construction, the nursery held a little over 50,000 coral fragments. That's the number the foundation had listed on its own site for most of the year. It's also, as you'll see below, the number that was about to change.
Tours run Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and on weekends by request. Groups of ten or more are asked to book two weeks out. There's no fee. You can see the tanks, watch a staff member demonstrate the fragmentation saw, and walk out having learned more about the thing on your commute than most people who've lived here for years.
On May 24, the foundation held a ribbon cutting for a new greenhouse expansion at Summerland Farms. Ocean advocates, community leaders, and residents showed up for an afternoon of tours and demonstrations before the group moved a few miles down the road that evening to South of the Seven, the restaurant at Sugarloaf Lodge, for a fundraiser called Cocktails for Corals.
David Vaughan told the crowd the expansion was overdue. After the brutal heatwaves and diseases the reef has absorbed in recent years, he said the local reef was at a breaking point, and the new infrastructure would let the team shield fragile coral species in a stable, land-based setting while prepping them for the wild instead of leaving them exposed to wild temperature swings offshore.
His daughter and the foundation's co-founder, Dee Dee Vaughan Smause, framed the night as a turning point rather than a milestone.
"It means we're moving past the dreaming phase. We now have the actual space and tools to match the scale of what our oceans are facing, and we get to do it alongside the community we love."
The fundraiser ran on a simple pitch: a $1,000 donation sponsors an entire tank of 1,100 micro-fragmented coral pieces. Supporters bought tanks, bid on auction items, and by the end of the night the foundation had the pledges to match the new tank capacity coming online.
Three months later, the story took a turn that had nothing to do with Summerland Key and everything to do with Tallahassee.
The greenhouse expansion celebrated in May was funded in part by $950,000 the state gave specifically to Plant A Million Corals to grow its Summerland Key nursery. That grant was one piece of a larger program called the Florida Coral Reef Restoration and Recovery Initiative, or FCR3, which Governor Ron DeSantis launched by executive order in 2023 as part of a 27-year plan to restore the state's reef tract. Since then the state has distributed $28.5 million to 14 organizations, universities, nonprofits, and aquariums included, all working different pieces of the same reef.
This year was supposed to be the year the program scaled up. Funding was set to jump to $25 million annually, money earmarked for the unglamorous, expensive part of the work that doesn't show up in ribbon-cutting photos.
Instead, the legislature and the governor cut all funding for FCR3 in this year's budget. According to reporting from The Florida Trib published this month, the nurseries that spent the past several years building capacity, Summerland Farms among them, now have grown coral with nowhere near enough money to get it back in the water.
Dee Dee Vaughan Smause put the problem plainly to the reporter: the biggest concern for organizations like hers is how to keep supporting projects that were designed around the assumption that future funding would show up. It didn't.
The timing lands hard. When the reporter visited Summerland Farms in early September, staff were rigging tanks designed to cycle saltwater over a brood of 100,000 coral fragments, nearly double what the facility held before the greenhouse went up. Just offshore, the reef the nursery exists to rebuild was bleaching again in record ocean temperatures. The capacity to grow twice as much coral now exists a few hundred yards from a reef that needs it more urgently than ever, and the money to bridge that last stretch, the boats and divers and tanks, isn't there.
None of this happens somewhere abstract. It happens behind a hedge most residents drive past without a second look, at an address that shows up on your own Overseas Highway commute. The lodge restaurant that hosted the fundraiser, South of the Seven, is a place plenty of Summerland Key residents already treat as a regular stop. The nursery itself is walkable from Summerland Cove for anyone with the afternoon free.
State funding fights get decided in committee rooms in Tallahassee, not on this key. But the thing those decisions affect, whether a working coral farm on Overseas Highway keeps growing or has to scale back, is decided by budgets that residents here have almost no say over and almost total proximity to. That gap between who decides and who lives next door is worth sitting with the next time you pass the hedge.
The foundation still runs free tours, still takes volunteers for nursery maintenance and in-water planting dives, and still needs the kind of local support that doesn't wait on a legislative session. If the May fundraiser is any indication, another Cocktails for Corals event is a reasonable bet for anyone who wants to watch this story from the inside rather than read about it after the fact.
For now, the simplest thing a Summerland Key resident can do is the thing most haven't gotten around to yet: book the free weekday tour, walk past the hedge, and see the tanks that are either going to double the amount of coral going back on the reef or sit there waiting on a budget that hasn't been written yet.
Local knowledge here isn't just knowing which restaurant has live music on a Monday. It's knowing what's actually growing behind the landscaping on your own street, and what happens to it next. Bobby Coe works and lives across these same keys, and if you're weighing a move to this stretch of the Lower Keys or just want a longer conversation about what makes Summerland Key what it is, reach out to schedule a private consultation.
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