About the Owner, John Lawrence

JOHN'S POND PLANTS is a Florida Aquatics Plants Nursery located in the Beautiful Green Swamp Wetlands Preserve in the "Heart of the Floridan Aquifer."  
 John Lawrence, the owner of John's Ponds Plants, has been a nature lover and "watcher" who, as a boy intensely studied and read every book he could on nature and fish and birds. He loved James Audubon and bird-watching and could identify birds by their scientific names at just 7 years of age. He recalls a first grade assignment where the class's homework was to "Write down as many birds as you can think of on a sheet of paper and turn it in in the morning." The following day the other kids had from around 5 to 22 bird's names listed on their papers. John showed up with a spiral notebook and began reading off his list to the class for his teacher. Ms. Pence, he explains "Ms Pence we called her, our teacher, bless her heart, well...when she finally got to me, I pulled out my notebook and started reading out loud. I easily got up to around 60 or 70 something birds, poor Ms. Pence, she was VERY patient...until I got into the chickadees and titmice. I called out the bird known as the "Great Tit" and the class immediately roared with laughter! She quickly said "very good, John, you can sit down. And by the way, Just how many birds are on your paper, errrr book there? I think it was like three thousand forty something or so, I can't remember....I was up all night writing, I do remember that! Hahaha...Good grief, poor Ms Pence!"
  It was during his studying of bird identification that he noticed fabulously beautiful colored flowers just floating on top of the water in paintings by an Impressionist artist named "Claude Monet'.  He recalls asking his parents back then if those beautiful flowers sitting on top of those ponds were in fact real. The images by Monet stayed in his head and John's quest to know everything he could about those "floating water lilies" has been a life long and ongoing journey to this day.     
  John's admiration for nature and the joys of raising and cultivating beautiful water garden plants and fish eventually resulted in his farm, JOHN'S POND PLANTS.        
  He continues his quest for knowledge on what each and every pond plant and aquatic creature likes to be happy and healthy, and more importantly HOW to spread that joy to everyone that he can. John's simple philosophy is to make ponding and water gardening easy and available to the "pondering a pond" ponder, the beginning ponder, and the master gardener alike.
   According to John, "Ponding should be never be hard work, it should be easy and fun!" explaining the the excitement of a new ponder seeing their first lily or lotus, "that they grew" bloom for the first time is "an amazing thing...it's something they'll never forget."  Just like the first time he saw the natural beauty that Monet painted on canvas. "I'm a teacher at heart and a very lucky man", John says.
"My plants are like my paints, my customers are like my student's. Their canvases are water gardens and backyard ponds from coast to coast...I truly love what I do."