On Saturday, October 10, cars will line up at Robbins Lodge and Open Space Preserve on South Hiatus Road, and nobody will have to get out of the vehicle. Drive through, tell the volunteer which tree you requested, and a three-gallon native goes into your trunk. No parking, no walking it back yourself, no forms beyond the ones you filled out ahead of time. It reads like a nice Saturday morning perk. It is actually the second half of a project the Town of Davie already finished somewhere else.
That first half happened quietly, without a ribbon cutting. Under a 2025 grant from the Urban and Community Forestry Plantings, Preservation, and Invasives Control program, administered by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and funded through the USDA Forest Service, crews pulled 22 Category I invasive tree species out of the ground between two specific parks: Pine Island Park at the Bamford Sports Complex on South Pine Island Road, and Robbins Preserve itself on South Hiatus Road. In their place went 71 native and Florida-friendly trees. That work is done. The canopy between those two parks looks different now than it did a year ago, and the town has the grant paperwork to prove why.
Saturday's giveaway is the same restoration logic, handed to residents instead of contractors. The trees on the pickup list are the same category the town just planted on public land. Mayor Judy Paul framed it plainly in the announcement: "By planting healthy trees today, we are creating greener neighborhoods, providing more shade, and strengthening Davie's tree canopy for the future." Read that next to the invasive removal numbers and the sentence stops being a ribbon-cutting line. It is a description of the same canopy project, just moved from a park easement to your front yard.
What you're actually picking up
The stock comes in two pot sizes. Everything is a three-gallon container except tropical sage, which comes in a one-gallon pot. Height and size vary by tree, and the town's advice is straightforward: know your space before you request a species, because a three-gallon oak and a three-gallon crepe myrtle are headed for very different footprints in ten years. Residents who want planting depth and species-specific care before Saturday can check the town's tree planting guidance directly through the Town of Davie's site rather than guessing.
Pickup itself is built for volume, not ceremony. You register, you get approved, and on the day you drive through a designated lane while a team loads the tree for you. It is a mechanism built to move a lot of trees through a lot of trunks in three hours, which tracks with a town trying to convert one restoration grant into hundreds of individually owned canopy trees rather than a few dozen park specimens.
The garden day wrapped around it
Gardens Matter Day started in 2023 as a standalone event at the Davie Community Gardens, tucked inside Robbins Lodge Preserve Park. It has run every October since, and the format has stayed consistent: free, no registration required, workshops from local speakers, food trucks and vendor booths, planter kits to take home. Last year's session, held October 11, 2025, is the clearest preview of what this year's workshops will likely resemble in tone if not in exact lineup. Adriana Algeri covered flood and land management on residential property. Sandy Jones took on pest and disease identification. David Stack walked attendees through keeping iguanas out of a garden bed, which is not a hypothetical problem for anyone gardening in Broward. Alexa Pavan closed with the practical case for composting.
None of that is trivia. If you're taking home a three-gallon native tree on the same morning, the land management and pest sessions are the difference between a tree that survives its first South Florida wet season and one that doesn't. The town built the giveaway and the workshop day to land on the same Saturday for a reason: one teaches you to keep the other alive.
The ground under the parking lot has its own story
Robbins Preserve isn't a generic 160 acres the town happened to pick for a tree event. It carries a specific history that shapes how it's used today. The park is named for Bill Robbins, described in local records as a "gentleman" cattle rancher and citrus farmer who once served as International President of Rotary Club, and who personally collected the ornamental plants that now fill the oak hardwood hammock in the preserve's northwest corner. That same hammock sits on a ridge system originally used by native peoples for campsites, back when the surrounding land was still Everglades.
Elsewhere on the property, a set of bells marks Easter Hill, the spot where the pioneering Wray, Chaplin, and Wood families held Easter sunrise services in the 1960s. That site is now a gazebo used for weddings and Sunday concerts, and according to the Davie Land Trust, the property's original farmhouse now hosts a wedding or reception nearly every weekend. Tucked in the same northwest corner as the hammock is a rare stand of Golden Royal Poincianas, planted decades ago and still blooming.
The preserve also anchors one end of a working horse and bike trail that runs along a canal toward Flamingo Gardens, lined in places with shaving brush trees that flower annually. The Davie Land Trust calls Robbins Park a primary destination for local trail riders, which lines up with the preserve's official description: pasture, equestrian trails, an equestrian facility, and hardwood hammocks folded into 160 acres that still function as working open land rather than a manicured municipal park.
None of this history is why the giveaway is happening here. It's why the giveaway lands differently here than it would somewhere else. A tree picked up at Robbins Preserve goes home to join a canopy that already includes a Rotary International president's personal plant collection, a wedding gazebo built on a 1960s sunrise-service site, and a horse trail that predates most of the subdivisions around it.
What Saturday actually adds up to
Strip away the workshop schedule and the pot sizes, and the mechanism is simple. A state grant paid to remove invasive trees from two Davie parks and replace them with 71 natives. That work finished. The same species list, funded through the same canopy priority, is now available by the truckload to any Davie resident willing to drive through a parking lot on a Saturday morning. The garden workshops that surround it exist so the trees people take home actually survive long enough to matter.
Anyone weighing whether their own property fits into that canopy plan, or wondering what a mature tree line does for privacy and shade on an acre lot in Davie's horse country, is welcome to reach out to Tommy Crivello Group. We spend our days walking this same ground.
