Food Feature: Green relief

Marie Selby Gardens feeds your hunger for beauty and peace

If you think Sarasota, Fla., is just a lot of sun, surf and white sand beaches where tanned, hard-bunned boys with six-pack abs and overly endowed babes frolic, mostly naked, you’re partially right. We got lotsa sun, surf and white sand.

We also got culture: museums, art galleries, ballet, opera, our very own symphony orchestra and performing arts hall. And to feed the perennial snowbirds, we have more than our fair share of upscale restaurants.

But that’s the stuff that gets most of the Chamber of Commerce ink.

The secret of Sarasota is a small slice of paradise known as the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, a 13-acre haven as beautiful as it is peaceful.

Bordered by the shimmering Sarasota Bay, Hudson Bayou and the red bricks of Palm Avenue, it’s within walking distance of the center of downtown. Yet it’s so isolated you’ll think you’re in another world.

A ticket to the Gardens could come with a guarantee to lower your blood pressure. As soon as you drive onto Palm Avenue from speeded up U.S. 41, your stress and tension dissipate. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings could have had this place in mind when she wrote, “I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to.”

This is it — a series of gardens, displays and statuary joined by pathways, descriptive markers and benches. There’s also a gift shop to spend money so you won’t feel completely untethered.

A favorite area is the Display House where myriad epiphytic plants — especially bromeliads and orchids — are placed at the peak of their bloom. It’s like being in a rainforest without the bugs and snakes.

Nearby, a pond filled with koi splash among bald cypress, elephant ear and various water lilies. Claude Monet once said, “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.” This site illustrates why he was so fond of painting water lilies.

But you don’t have to be a flowerphile to enjoy a day here. No other place in Sarasota is more romantic. Several areas are frequently used for weddings. A gazebo practically shouts: “Propose to her here!”

My favorite site is the baywalk sanctuary, a wooden walkway through black mangroves, white mangroves and buttonwoods. The bustle of the city is within view yet seems remote.

Other individual gardens and displays include areas devoted to hibiscus, slow growing cycads, succulents, huge banyan trees with their imposing aerial roots and mighty oaks draped with Spanish moss. Near the Selby home, today a bookstore, grows a strand of bamboo that once protected the Selby family’s view of offending development then taking hold in Sarasota.

The tropical food garden is filled with all manner of edibles, some as common as the banana and pineapple and others novel, like black sapote, with its licorice-like taste and giant-leaf edible hibiscus.

The beauty here tells only a part of the story. During their 25 years, the gardens have developed a worldwide reputation for scientific research, educational programs and expeditions to exotic locales to bolster collections. The historic mansion houses a museum.

Whether you know a pistil from a stamen (or care), Marie Selby Botanical Gardens is a place to get away from the crowd. But for crying out loud, please don’t pick the flowers; it makes them soooo mad.

Selby Gardens is at 811 S. Palm Ave., Sarasota, Fla. Open daily 10 a.m.-5 p.m. $8 for ages 12 and older, $4 for children 6-11, free for kids under 5. 941-366-5731.??






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