11-11-2023: Naples Botanical Garden

One of the “traditional” ventures we’ve done while in Venice is to go to Marie Selby Garden in Sarasota. This visit, however, Deeny suggested, and encouraged, us to drive south to Naples to visit the Naples Botanical Garden. It’s about 90 minutes from Venice. I think it is funny to be driving from Venice to Naples while in Florida. Christine and I set off Saturday morning for a day in a garden.

Naples Botanical Garden is a 170-acre, world-class garden that features plants from around the world. A botanical garden is a garden with a documented collection of living plants for the purpose of scientific research, conservation, display, and education. Naples Botanical garden is a relatively young garden having been founded in 1993 with the construction of the garden starting in 2008. During founding and construction, people were fund-raising, purchasing land, planning the layout, and working on acquiring plants, trees and shrubs. Two lakes were dug and the 250,000 yards of fill from the lakes was used to sculpt the garden. There are several distinct gardens with the overall garden showcasing plants and trees from different ares, the Caribbean Garden, Brazilian Garden, Asian Garden, as well as numerous water features and other distinctive garden areas.

It’s a wonderful garden and we spent about 4 hours wandering around the paths and trails taking in plants and trees I’ve never seen before and seeing some old favorites. There was something interesting to see and learn every step of the way. At several points one can scan a QR code and pull up an audio recording to hear some detail about what you’re looking at.

I love textures and patterns in plants and, of course, I want to touch everything to see what the plants feel like.

There were numerous water features throughout the garden, which I think was my favorite part of the garden. There’s something about water, especially if it is moving, with the sound and thesky and clouds being reflected, that is magical and beautiful.

Another of my favorite sections was the Asian Garden. I like the statuary, the neatness and lines, and Asian gardens feel somewhat spiritual to me.

One tree that I’ve never heard of was a cannonball tree. It’s seed pods look exactly like cannonballs hanging in clumps. The tree is in the Brazil nut family. This tree also apparently has lovely large, aromatic flowers.

I could post a great many pictures of the various plants, we both took lots of pictures. But I will just end with a few more. The garden has a nice orchid section, and we did see some other very interesting shrubs and flowers.

We’re so glad Deeny suggested we visit this garden. It was a great day and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. The only thing that would have made it a perfect day was if Deeny had accompanied us (she wasn’t feeling up to the drive and all the walking), but we came home and showed her the 292 photos that Christine took!