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Miami Art Week is finished, the Super Bowl is over, Olympics have ended, and the Coconut Grove Art Festival has gone. Omicron has touched all and mostly left empty parking lot testing centers. The Jewish Film Festival has said its shalom, and though the annual, disorganized Miami Film Festival is coming, I missed the press deadline. Spring has nearly sprung, traffic has tripled like cream cheese prices, and please don’t get started on rent or mortgages, even if many people here are grandfathered in. What’s left for winter? What now?
If it’s March, it’s time to look at things that are blooming. Here are some romantic, rejuvenating suggestions.
At Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden, you will find a reasonable argument for 83 acres of the most mesmerizingly beautiful place in Miami, let alone the world, a literal tropical paradise which is filled with as many breathtakingly beautiful plants as this sentence is full of adverbial praise. Established in 1936 by Robert H. Montgomery whose passion was plant-collecting, Montgomery purchased the 83-acre site along Biscayne Bay and later deeded it in large part to Miami-Dade County.
Montgomery named the garden after his friend, distinguished plant explorer David Fairchild, whose travels brought more than 75,000 plants to the United States, including pima cotton, durham wheat, mangos, alfalfa, nectarines, dates, horseradish, bamboos, and flowering cherry trees. Many plants still growing in the Garden were collected and planted by Fairchild, including a giant African baobab tree. The garden was designed by landscape architect William Lyman Phillips. It’s massive, extraordinary, and offers much more than can be mentioned here.
Admission to this Coral Gables attraction typically costs $24.95 for adults, $17.95 for seniors and $15.95 for students. Tickets usually cost $12 for children ages 6-17 and are free for those who are younger. There are also all sorts of wonderful, ludicrous discounts for seniors no matter how rich, veterans, emergency responders, walkers or bicyclists who left the Range Rovers at home, or people who drove up in their Range Rovers but show a AAA card LOL, and people who fell during the Olympics.
On the campus of the U, the Gifford Arboretum was started in 1947 by Dr. Frank J. Rimoldi and Dr. Roy Woodbury, professors of tropical botany. Coral Gables tree activist Kathy Gaubatz made sure the U didn’t pave paradise and put up a parking lot, and the University of Miami gave full support to the renovation and enhancement of the Gifford Arboretum in 1992. After surviving Hurricane Andrew with little damage, no one expected the destruction that Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma inflicted on the Arboretum; nearly half the trees died.
Professor Carol Horvitz then got to work, hooked up a few grants, planted 200 new trees, and the rest is respect. Aside from drop-dead crazy blooming trees, the Gifford is free 8 days a week.
After you see some of the unusual plants, you can drive to the Redlands to a lovely nursery like Richard Lyons’ and buy some rare exotic plants and trees, including tropical fruit rarely seen elsewhere. No offense, but Home Depot and Lowes are NOT the best places to buy plants, trees, and flowers. Aside from Lyons and all the cool places down south, Galloway Farm Nursery, Plasencia, Casaplanta, Bamboo Man, and My Family are just a few of the many places to visit in order to get your beauty on.
