Lopez Gardening Joins Mariani Premier Group as Sixth Florida Firm

What happened

On July 2, 2026, Mariani Premier Group announced that Lopez Gardening, a landscaping company in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, had joined its portfolio. MPG describes the deal as a partnership. The announcement did not include a price or any other financial terms.

The company

Jaime Gonzalez's uncle founded Lopez Gardening in 1970 as a one-man operation. Gonzalez started working alongside him at 16 and took ownership from him in 1992. The company has grown from a three-person crew doing residential maintenance for nine homes to a team of more than 60 that services more than 200 homes and condominiums. Its focus is high-end residential clients in the Palm Beach Gardens area of northern Palm Beach County, including year-round and seasonal homeowners, and it also serves commercial properties in South Florida.

Its maintenance division runs custom care plans covering lawn, plant health and fertilization. Alongside it, a construction team builds hardscapes, retaining walls, espalier walls and synthetic turf, and an enhancements team installs new features and systems.

Gonzalez stays with the company as vice president of operations and keeps leading its team. The business still operates under the Lopez Gardening name. "We are overjoyed to join Mariani Premier Group as one of the top providers of luxury landscape services in South Florida," Gonzalez said, adding that the company "will continue to uphold its longstanding tradition of superior standards and personal attention that has characterized our operations for more than fifty years."

The buyer

Mariani Premier Group is based in Lake Bluff, Illinois. It grew out of Mariani Landscape, a company with more than 65 years in the green industry, and was built around Frank Mariani's idea of bringing top landscaping companies from across the country into one peer group. CI Capital Partners acquired Mariani in December 2020. By March 2025 the group had completed 26 add-on acquisitions.

Lopez Gardening is the sixth Florida-based luxury landscape company in the group. Four weeks later, on July 30, MPG added Mitschele's, a Phoenix landscaping company.

Chief executive Bryan Christiansen said the group looks forward to "helping Lopez Gardening grow by working together with our other companies to expand their offerings and better serve our clients throughout South Florida."

What this means for South Florida landscaping owners

A business built on recurring high-end residential clients in one market now sits inside a national platform, next to five other Florida luxury landscape firms. For owners in the Southeast with a similar client book, that makes the group an established buyer in the state with a private equity sponsor behind it. It also shows the owner staying on in a new role. Gonzalez, who has run the business since 1992, now holds a vice president of operations title inside a much larger group, and that kind of role is worth settling early in any conversation about selling a landscaping business to private equity.

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Source: Mariani Premier Group - https://marianipremiergroup.com/mariani-premier-group-deepens-florida-presence-through-addition-of-south-floridas-lopez-gardening/