Garden Getaways
Botanical gardens cultivate the peaceful pleasures.
by Trish RileySouth Florida offers a wealth of opportunities to replenish your spirit and refresh your physique. In addition to the warm sunshine, salty surf and well-trained fingers of dozens of massage therapists, we have several lush, green botanical gardens that welcome the public to visit and explore them.
Open seven days a week, the Miami Beach Botanical Garden is one of the city's great little bargains: Admission is free. Just through its iron entrance gates (across from Hall D of the Miami Beach Convention Center), a circular fountain lined with dark red miniature roses graces the entryway. A terrace with tall hedges is flanked by the garden's boardroom and the glass-roofed conservatory. A tall palm frond stretches through the second story ceiling of the glass shelter, which protects the garden's collection of more than 300 orchids.
The gardens are cool and colorful with tall Norfolk pines; palm trees; butterfly-loving blue plumbago; red, white and pink impatiens; yellow canna lilies and pink and red bromeliads. Other butterfly attractors in the garden include pink pentas, yellow buttercups and Florida's ancient cycad, the coontie plant. A bushy barrier helps isolate the garden from the city surrounding it, although the roar of lumbering buses can be heard over the cackle of green parrots roosting in the camouflaging tall trees. A garden gift shop offers implements and accessories for gardeners, as well as artwork and unusual books.
In the heart of the city's most fashionable area, the garden frequently holds special art and music events for the community.
Visitors are invited to snack, sniff and nibble as they make their way around the garden, so long as they don't pluck anything right off the branches.
If you feel like a drive and you're getting a little hungry for something off the fast track, take time to visit this Miami-Dade County park. It's about 35 miles south of downtown in the Redland, an agricultural area established about 100 years ago. The iron-rich soil still serves as foundation to some of Florida's best farmland. Winter is a great time to tour the Redland, for many farmers offer samplings of their fare at roadside stands; look for tomatoes, strawberries, avocados, mangoes and fresh-cut flowers from January to May.
Harvest time also is a good time to visit the Fruit and Spice Park, which is home to more than 500 varieties of exotic fruit, spices, herbs and nuts. Tour guides invite visitors to sample the tangy guava, sweet sapote, musky coffee beans and jaboticaba berries-or whatever else is ripe as you meander through the 35-acre park. The bookstore has a fascinating collection of books with growing tips and recipes, plus a variety of candies and sauces made from some of the more unusual produce of the world.
The scent of ylang-ylang, frangipani and over-ripe bananas; the tall trees, the wide lawn and the big sky-it all comes together to create a wonderful escape from city streets and shopping malls.
Today the collection is the foundation of an extensive plant database, the virtual herbarium. A botanical resource center, the garden provides classes for children and adults and hosts a graduate studies program.
It's not uncommon to encounter wildlife such as yard-long iguanas, alligators, raccoons and foxes living comfortably in the garden habitats that recall old Florida, a rainforest, and the manicured lawn with crumbling statuary, palms and pond. The subtropical flora and fauna provide a pleasant afternoon adventure. Enjoy!