Gulfshore Playhouse’s ‘Native Gardens’ creates a neighbors’ feud with weed-killer strength

By the time “Native Gardens” roars toward its conclusion, there are few hot buttons left to push. The two couples fighting over property rights to a 2-foot strip of back yard have put their trigger fingers all over race, status, gender, politics — even gardening philosophy. 

In the near-perfect current production from Gulfshore Playhouse, these historical-district neighbors distill what is wrong with human communication today even before texting and email are factored in. We can be a thin-skinned, self-righteous, entitled species.

And in real life, it can get much uglier than the weed-pitching and stake-pulling antics between the senior squires of the neighborhood, Frank and Virginia Butley, and their upwardly mobile Latinx neighbors, Pablo and Tania Del Valle. 

Harriet Howard Heithaus, Naples Daily News