Lush lure of weird, exotic Florida thrives at McKee Botanical Garden
One of the great things about Orlando’s mid-Florida location is that many interesting destinations can be reached in a drive of two hours or less, making possible fine day trips that can shake off COVID-era cabin fever.
Thus it was, on a recent Sunday, I found myself in the cool shadows of a rather strange building, dubbed the Hall of Giants, at McKee Botanical Garden in Vero Beach, watching a black-and-white video screen.
“It’s one of those things like they used to show at the movies,” I overheard another visitor say to his kids. He was right. In my childhood, I soaked up plenty of “short subjects” at the movies, along with cartoons.
Mystery of the tropics
The one showing on the monitor, from 1939, featured my surroundings in their first incarnation as McKee Jungle Gardens. It also offered excellent evidence of how Florida was marketed in those days, as both a wild place and a safe one. At McKee, brimming with “weird” wildlife, tourists could plumb “the mystery of the tropics in safety,” less than a stone’s throw from the highway, the narrator declared.
Pulling myself from the screen, I turned to the building’s centerpiece — a 38-foot-long mahogany table, its top made from a single piece of wood — and thought of Waldo Sexton, the man responsible for the table, the building (supposedly a paean to a Polynesian ceremonial palace) and much of Vero Beach.
There’s a picture of Sexton from the late 1930s nearby, posing with the giant mahogany board. The McKee gardens’ website calls him a “land developer,” along with the gardens’ namesake, Arthur McKee. In 1922, the two men bought 80 acres of tropical hammock with the intent of growing citrus, but instead shaped their land into that safe mystery of the tropics the old newsreel advertised. By the 1940s, more than 100,000 tourists arrived each year to visit what had become one of Florida’s earliest and most popular attractions.
To call Waldo Sexton a land developer seems a little like calling Walt Disney a cartoonist, but it’s understandable. Sexton defies easy categorization. In an article in Indian River magazine, writer Gregory Enns calls him the most iconic figure in Vero Beach’s history: a man whose “entrepreneurial drive and vision permeated every sector of early Vero commerce,” including tourism.
Sexton was also an artist, amateur architect and collector, who recycled the refuse of elegant old buildings to create new structures that were structurally sound but looked “as if they had been haphazardly put together or were organic to the landscape,” Enns notes.
And so at McKee’s Hall of Giants, we see large bells, tile work, and fanciful sculptures, all there because Sexton loved them. His choices — quirky, eclectic, eccentric — seem to me part of an era of Florida tourism shaped not by corporations but by the personalities of visionaries like Sexton, or Dick Pope of Cypress Gardens, among others. It’s a heritage
worth visiting, when we can.
Caladiums in Gotha
Central Florida, of course, has historic garden spots right at home. Saturday, April 24, brings an opportunity to visit and support one of them, when Nehrling Gardens, 2267 Hempel Ave. in Gotha, again presents its spring Art & Stroll event, titled “Caladiums, Canvases and Coffee.” From 9 a.m. to noon, guests can watch artists at work and stock up on caladium bulbs for their home gardens. Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the event. Masks are required.
In the early 1900s, Henry Nehrling transformed the landscape of our state. He once grew as many as 250,000 caladium plants annually at his Gotha gardens and also tested more than 3,000 new and rare plants. For more information and advance tickets for April 24, visit NehrlingGardens.org. Questions? Call 407-445-9977.