Marie Selby Botanical Gardens

Marie Selby and her husband, an executive in the growing oil industry, settled in Sarasota in the early twentieth century and built a home on the bay, planting the grounds with tropical trees and flowers. A private, unassuming woman who loved the outdoors, Marie Selby left instructions that her estate become a botanical garden for the enjoyment of the public.

The garden opened to visitors in the 1970s and quickly found a distinctive mission. Rather than compete with larger gardens, it specialized in the epiphytes of the tropics, building a living collection and a research program that made this modest bayfront property a name known to botanists around the world.

Epiphytes are plants that grow on other plants, drawing moisture and nutrients from the air and rain rather than from soil. Orchids, bromeliads, ferns, and Spanish moss are all epiphytes, and they crowd the branches of tropical forests in astonishing variety. Selby's collection of these plants is among the finest anywhere, a living library of the canopy.

The garden's scientists travel to rainforests around the world to study and document these plants, and researchers here have described species new to science. Selby maintains a research collection and herbarium, so the beauty visitors enjoy in the conservatory is backed by decades of serious study aimed at understanding and protecting tropical plant life.

The signature living landmarks of the garden are its great banyan trees, whose branches send down aerial roots that thicken into new trunks, so a single tree spreads into a grove. Walking beneath their curtains of roots is one of the quiet pleasures of a visit, a taste of the tropics on the edge of the bay.

The grounds gather many landscapes into a compact space: a koi pond, a bamboo grove, a garden of succulents, beds of tropical flowers, and a rainforest conservatory dripping with orchids and epiphytes. Throughout, the open lawns and waterfront paths offer sweeping views across Sarasota Bay, making the garden as much a place to sit and take in the water as to study the plants.

Winter and spring are the peak season, when the weather is mild and dry and Sarasota fills with visitors escaping the cold. Orchid and flower displays are timed to shine, the garden is at its most inviting, and spring brings warm days and lush growth as the tropical plants thrive and the rains begin to return.

Summer is hot, humid, and prone to afternoon storms, but the shade of the banyans and the conservatory offers relief, and the tropical plants are at their most vigorous. Fall cools gradually and the crowds thin, a pleasant, quiet time to wander the grounds as the garden settles toward its busy winter season.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.