The News-Press, news-press.com, Lifestyles, Botanical Gardens expanding

The News-Press, news-press.com, Lifestyles, Botanical Gardens expanding
Naples Botanical Gardens is thinking big.

Big like a Swiss Family Robinson-sized banyan tree.

Big like 5-foot-wide waterlillies with flowers the size of small basketballs.

Big like a whopping 45 acres of Asian, Caribbean, Brazilian and Florida plants.

Executive director Brian Holley says he's incredibly excited about all those big, big plans.

"We have a really beautiful garden right now," Holley says, "but it's quite small. This will be a quantum leap in the sort of experience that people will have."

By 2010, the garden will have expanded from one acre of visitor's space to more than 45 acres. That will grow to 65 acres in future phases of the expansion, plus another 10 acres has been set aside for future development.

The Naples garden opened in 1994, and this expansion project has been gestating ever since. A groundbreaking was at one time planned for spring 2003, but that got pushed back by changing plans and slow-downs because of environmental permitting and zoning.

Now things finally seem to be happening, Holley says.

They've already raised $27 million for the $55 million project, and Holley expects them to reach $35 million by late this year. When that happens, groundbreaking will finally start on the 160-acre property just 2.5 miles east of downtown Naples (About 95 acres have been set aside for preservation).

The money has been raised mostly through private donors and some corporate donors.

The gardens could open by late 2010. And when they do, Holley says, they'll be like nothing else in the U.S.

"It's going to blow people's socks off," he says.

Naples Botanical Garden is working with what Holley calls a "dream team" of garden designers: famous names such as Robert E. Truskowski of California and Made (pronounced Mah-de) Wijaya from Bali.

"These are some of the top people in the design game," Holley says.

Together, they're designing five gardens that celebrate the rich plantlife between the 26th north and south latitudes, the area that stretches from central South America to Southwest Florida. In other words: the tropics and the subtropics.

Those five themed gardens will be:

• The Florida Garden, featuring a stylized Calusa Indian shell mound, a fragrance garden and a circle of sabal palms and bougainvilleas surrounding a meadow of native wildflowers.

• The Children's Garden, where kids can climb a giant banyan tree, play hide-and-seek in a gumbo limbo grove, run through a fountain and make mud pies.

• The Brazilian Garden, filled with huge Victorian garden lillies, swaths of brilliant bromeliads and Brazilian trees with pink, yellow and purple flowers high up in their branches.

• The Caribbean Garden, filled with coconut palms and blue water.

• And The Asian Garden, which will mix highlights from across the Asian world for a spiritual, calming feel. The garden will feature bridges over water, Asian-style buildings, lichees and other fruit trees, plus live nutmeg, cinnamon and other herbs.

The whole idea is to bring people closer to nature, says Thomas Hecker, the garden's director of horticulture.

"We want people to be engaged," he says. "They'll be able to touch stuff, too, especially in the Children's Garden."

Hecker is convinced people will come away impressed by this big undertaking.

"It's going to be an experience unlike any other," he says.