Carmakal Tree Nursery, also known as Carmakal Botanicals. No online sales.

Personal cell 561-386-0924 (anytime). Contact form. We do not keep traditional office hours.

Carmakal Tree Nursery

Mast Trees in Loxahatchee and Wellington. Also known as Carmakal Botanicals.

The Italian Cypress Problem Has a Beautiful Solution.

Florida's favorite columnar tree is failing. The replacement is already in the ground.

Installed Mast Trees forming a tall green screen beside a lawn.
A long installed Mast Tree screen. This is a finished planting, not a before-and-after of Italian Cypress.

The problem

For decades, landscape architects and developers across South and Central Florida reached for Italian Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) as the default columnar accent — lining driveways, flanking entrances, and defining community perimeters.

Italian Cypress was never made for Florida. Subtropical humidity, heavy summer rain, and shaded pockets suit Seiridium canker, the fungus that produces brown patches, branch die-back, and decline. Spider mites can severely damage or kill it. Once a planting is infected with canker, control is temporary and replacement is the usual end. The Mast Tree is not susceptible to those spider mites.

Landscape professionals who have planted thousands of Italian Cypress in South Florida communities are changing the specification. The design intent was sound. The plant was wrong for the climate.

The Mast Tree in the same role

  • Same dramatic vertical statement — columnar to 30–45 feet, rarely wider than 6–8 feet.
  • At home in Florida heat and humidity. It is native to tropical India and Sri Lanka.
  • No Seiridium canker pattern, and not susceptible to the spider mites that can severely damage or kill Italian Cypress.
  • Wind-tolerant for its height. The flexible trunk bends.
  • Light pruning every 1–3 years.
  • Drought-tolerant once established.

Richard Lyons Nursery, a long-standing South Florida tropical authority, traces the species in the state to seed that came through Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami roughly forty years ago. We grow it now in a full range of sizes, in pots and in the ground.

A sunlit Mast Tree hedge running beside a stone walk.
An installed hedge along a walk. Spacing and size on a new project are confirmed in the conversation, not from this frame.

Potted trees and in-ground trees

Both are grown here, from small plants to large specimens. In-ground Mast Trees tend to be fuller. They cost more because they have to be extracted and prepared for shipment. We deliver and install either form, and we can build the rest of a South Florida plan from the other landscape and fruit trees on the same 16 acres, with your landscape architect.

A young staked Mast Tree row with trunks visible above the mulch.
A young row after planting. We install, and the trees still need establishment watering after that.