Walton County, FL Landscaping Rules: Native Plants (2026)

01 of the Land Development Code (Appendix C) sets Walton County's baseline landscaping standards for any project that must submit a landscape plan with its development order application. Subsection C requires diversity in plantings: no single species may make up more than 50 percent of a landscape plan, and at least 75 percent of all plant material in the plan must be native plants. Palm trees are limited to no more than 25 percent of the plan, except Saw Palmetto, Scrub Palmetto, and Cabbage Palm, which the code names outright as native, drought-tolerant Walton County species and exempts from that cap.

These standards apply to commercial buildings, multifamily projects, and residential subdivisions or other residential developments that require a development order, but subsection B carves out an exemption for a single-family home or duplex used as a residence, so an individual homeowner replanting an existing yard is not bound by the 75 percent native-plant threshold. 07 backs the native-plant requirement with an Approved Tree and Plant List (Table 5-2) of permitted canopy and understory trees, coded with asterisks and plus signs to flag species suited to street tree use or salt-tolerant dune plantings, and the Director of Planning and Development Services may accept additional species case by case.

Because the native-plant percentage is calculated across the whole landscape plan rather than plant by plant, a project can mix ornamental accents with native canopy trees, understory trees, shrubs, and groundcover so long as the 75/25 split and the palm cap are met when the plan is submitted for development order review.