The only botanical garden on TIME’s world list is right here in Sarasota, Florida

It’s where orchids grow in the air

Forty-five acres split between two campuses in Sarasota County, and not a square foot of it feels ordinary.

Marie Selby Botanical Gardens sits where botanical science meets living landscape, and the results stop people in their tracks.

TIME magazine put it on the list of the World’s Greatest Places in 2024, one of only eight U.S. destinations to make the cut and the only botanical garden in the world to earn a spot. That alone should tell you something.

The woman who left her home to everyone

Marie and William Selby moved to Sarasota in 1921 and bought land right on the bay. Marie wasn’t just a gardener who liked pretty flowers.

She helped found the Sarasota Garden Club in 1927 and spent decades cultivating what she’d built. When she died in 1971, she left the property and $2 million to create a botanical garden the public could use.

The gardens opened four years later and have since become a Smithsonian Affiliate accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.

The world’s only garden built around plants that live on air

No other botanical garden on earth does what the Downtown campus does.

Its entire focus is epiphytic orchids, bromeliads, gesneriads, and ferns, which are plants that grow on other plants rather than in soil, pulling moisture and nutrients straight from the air.

More than 20,000 living plants are on the grounds, including 5,500 orchids and 3,500 bromeliads.

Selby’s scientists have discovered or described more than 2,000 plant species previously unknown to science, the result of more than 150 expeditions into the tropics and subtropics.

Banyans, boardwalks and a butterfly garden along the bay

The Downtown campus doesn’t feel like a museum. Walking the grounds, you move through banyans, bamboo, live oaks, palms, cycads, succulents, and wildflowers.

A butterfly garden near the Payne Mansion was designed to bring back native butterfly populations. There’s a fragrance garden, an edible garden, and a koi pond with a waterfall where the path slows down on its own.

A boardwalk runs along the bayfront through red, white, and black mangroves, and the banyan grove in front of the Selby House includes trees planted in 1939.

Step inside a greenhouse that feels like a rainforest

One of eight greenhouses on site, the tropical conservatory is the one you can walk through. Waterfalls run down mossy rocks, and the canopy closes in around you.

The orchids on display come mostly from native habitats, not commercial growers, so what you’re seeing isn’t window dressing.

Because the plants rotate based on what’s in bloom, a visit in March looks different from one in October.

Check the current status of the conservatory before you go, since it has gone through renovation at different points.

Your kids can walk a rope bridge 27 feet off the ground

The Ann Goldstein Children’s Rainforest Garden opened in 2013 beneath a century-old banyan tree, and it gives children something most playgrounds don’t: height.

A canopy walk and swinging rope bridges run 27 feet above the ground.

Below, a 12-foot waterfall feeds a forest pool, and an Epiphyte Canyon hides caves and nooks to explore. A field research station and amphitheater handle the educational side of things.

The garden has one entry and exit point, so you can let younger kids roam without watching every corner.

The campus that runs on sunlight and sends power back to the grid

A $52 million expansion finished in January 2024 turned the Downtown campus into the world’s first net-positive energy botanical garden complex.

A 50,000-square-foot solar array sits above the new Morganroth Family Living Energy Access Facility, which holds parking, a gift shop, and vertical gardens.

The 2,158-panel system produces about 1.27 million kilowatt-hours per year, roughly 10 percent more than the entire campus uses. The expansion also won the 2025 American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum.

Underground vaults and living certifications push the design further

The solar panels get the headlines, but the design goes deeper than that, literally.

An underground stormwater vault captures millions of gallons of runoff and cleans it before sending it back to Sarasota Bay.

The Phase One expansion added 188,000 square feet of new facilities and grew the open garden space by 30 percent. A multi-use trail now links the campus to the bayfront.

The buildings held through two hurricanes, including a direct hit from Hurricane Milton, and the campus is working toward Living Building and Living Community Petal Certification.

The research collections here rival the world’s top botanical institutions

Walk past the public paths and into Selby’s research infrastructure, and the scale of the scientific operation becomes clear. The herbarium holds more than 125,000 dried and pressed plant specimens.

The Spirit Collection, nearly 28,000 vials of flowers preserved in fluid, ranks second in the world behind only the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

The research library holds rare botanical volumes going back to the late 1700s.

Selby has also published Selbyana, a peer-reviewed journal on canopy biology and tropical plants, since 1975.

Five thousand years of Florida history on Little Sarasota Bay

The second campus sits about 10 miles south in Osprey, on 30 acres along Little Sarasota Bay. Historic Spanish Point became part of Selby Gardens in May 2020, but its history runs much deeper.

It was the first property in Sarasota County listed on the National Register of Historic Places back in 1975. Carbon-14 dating puts human activity on the site at roughly 5,000 years ago.

You can walk through A Window to the Past, a museum exhibit built inside a prehistoric shell mound, and stand inside a place that holds more history than most places you’ll ever visit.

Pioneer cabins, a jungle walk and the region’s only butterfly house

Bertha Palmer, a Chicago socialite, bought the Spanish Point property in 1910. She kept the pioneer buildings standing and added her own gardens around them.

Her Jungle Walk winds through native trees alongside a cement aqueduct she built to carry spring water around a ceremonial midden.

The campus holds the region’s only butterfly house, where Zebra Longwings, Malachites, and Julias move through the air around you.

Shaded nature trails cover the coastal habitat, and a boardwalk puts you out over Little Sarasota Bay. Docent-led walking tours cover about 1.25 miles of the grounds.

The plan for what’s coming next is as ambitious as what’s already here

Selby calls itself The Living Museum, and the name fits.

Rotating exhibitions run through the garden settings, mixing horticulture, art, and large-scale sculpture.

The Museum of Botany and the Arts in the historic Christy Payne Mansion ties plant science to visual art in a way that works in both directions.

Phase Two of the master plan adds a hurricane-resilient greenhouse complex and a learning pavilion. Phase Three takes on the two major historic buildings and the seawalls.

The garden that opened in 1975 with a $2 million gift is still building toward something bigger.

Visit Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida

Both campuses are open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed on Christmas Day. The Downtown Sarasota campus sits at 1534 Mound Street, Sarasota, FL 34236.

The Historic Spanish Point campus is at 401 N Tamiami Trail, Osprey, FL 34229. Free parking is available at the Downtown campus inside the LEAF structure.

One membership covers both campuses.

Admission prices and tour schedules are available on the official website, and checking there before your visit is worth the two minutes it takes.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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