Marie Selby Botanical Gardens: The Most Beautiful Place in Sarasota
On a peninsula jutting into Sarasota Bay, one of the world's great botanical institutions rewards a slow morning like nowhere else in the city.
By Edit Sarasota
There is a particular quality of light at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in the hour after opening, when the bay is still and the Spanish moss in the old live oaks catches the low morning sun. It is the kind of light that makes you want to stay.
Selby occupies six and a half acres on Hudson Bayou, a thin finger of bay that runs between downtown and the barrier islands. The site was the home of William and Marie Selby, who made their fortune in Standard Oil and spent decades cultivating what would become one of the world's most important collections of epiphytic orchids and bromeliads.
After Marie Selby's death in 1971, the property became a botanical garden and research institution — the only one in the world dedicated specifically to epiphytes. The science that happens here is genuine and significant. Selby's herbarium contains over 135,000 specimens. Its scientists have described hundreds of new plant species. The library holds one of the world's great collections of botanical art.
But you don't need to care about any of that to love being here. The banyan grove alone — a tangle of aerial roots and horizontal limbs that creates a kind of green cathedral — is worth the drive. The tropical conservatory houses an otherworldly concentration of orchids in bloom. The great oaks along the waterfront shade benches from which you can watch pelicans work the bay.
A recent expansion has added a new visitors center and doubled the accessible garden space, including a spectacular new orchid display house and a children's garden that has become one of the most thoughtful family spaces in the region.
Selby rewards returning visitors. The garden changes with the seasons — the orchid displays rotate, the trees grow, the light shifts. Come in summer for the bromeliads. Come in winter when the tourists thin out and you can have the oak canopy nearly to yourself.