Benito Crosdale turns childhood love of plants into business
Published:Saturday | May 24, 2025 | 12:05 AMKrysta Anderson/Staff Reporter
Growing up, Benito Crosdale was responsible for taking care of his mother’s plants. As he got older, he pursued his degree in engineering, but his love for nature stayed right by his side. Today, ignited by his mother’s passion, Crosdale has started a successful blooming business.
“I began operating a small business between 2019 and 2020 after my family had inherited a small piece of anthurium farm. I would bring those plants to my face-to-face classes, selling them to my classmates and teachers. I started making money to the point where I could pay my own tuition,” the owner of L and L Flowery told Saturday Living.
He even branched out into providing more plants like succulents before the restrictions of classes due to the global pandemic.
Since then, he has seen tremendous growth in his green variety as well as his business. He now owns a nursery and greenhouse with plants and about an acre of land. He even acquired a storefront recently. His mother has been particularly pleased by this venture.
Crosdale currently has Aglaonemas and Areca palms, which tend to thrive indoors, along with other varieties such as Christmas palms, foxtail palms, fishtail palms, and royal palms. He even carries Chinese and Japanese fan palms.
MANY SPECIES AT THE NURSERY
At the nursery, the company offers 30 different varieties of hibiscus, 35 types of roses, along with pentas, petunias, and a range of landscaping plants such as Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), crown of thorns, bougainvilleas, silver butterwood, and Texan sage, to name a few.
Along with plants, the business also supplies fibreglass pots, offers irrigation solutions, and has a range of stylish water features available for purchase.
Aside from the aesthetics, some of the benefits of having indoor plants include purifying the air, “Plants produce oxygen and use up carbon dioxide. So it leaves your indoor feeling fresher. This is especially important for persons who live in apartments.”
For outdoor plants, he said, beautification is a wonderful benefit, “When you have certain plants, you start to invite butterflies. You start to invite all different types of birds. You’re inviting very beneficial things to the ecosystem so now you’re doing a good thing for the environment.”
As far as rookie mistakes first-time plant parents make, he listed overwatering as one of the main factors that can lead to a green baby’s demise. Plant parents, he explained, are usually overzealous. And because they’re new to the space, they often start small with succulents that require minimal care – then end up providing too much moisture, which can either kill the plant or cause root rot.
Plants like orchids, he shared, require a lot of care. And new owners tend to find it difficult to understand this, “To own an orchid is to truly understand what it takes to nurture and grow this plant. Anybody who is just venturing into orchids, I always say get a vanda. A shade vanda or a sun vanda requires the least maintenance. Once you water them and mix in local plant food every now and then, you will get your blooms.”
Then there is the matter of shock. “When you think about something like the palms, what kills a lot of palms is actually shock. Say you come to my greenhouse, I have it in 40 per cent shade. I tell every one of my customers exactly what to do with the plant. Then they go and put that plant in direct sunlight. The plant is shocked by the change and suffers because you took it from where it’s comfortable and nice, and put it in a harsher environment,” he revealed.
What Crosdale enjoys the most about his plant journey is seeing the sheer excitement of people who visit the greenhouse, “Sometimes families will come in and just seeing how happy they are, especially with some of the blooms that they actually buy from the store, brings me great joy.” On a personal planter note, he enjoys seeing the success of his propagation.
His hope is to keep making himself and his family proud. Professionally, he aims to educate and inspire others about plants while turning his business into a household name.