What do you see when you look across a landscape?
Do you take it in from afar, as a pretty panorama? Or do you absorb the details—the curvature of a tree trunk, a patchwork of wildflowers, the textures of foliage and bark?
If you lean toward the first group, you are certainly not alone. There’s a lack of awareness when it comes to plants; people know they’re there—and generally appreciate their presence—but they don’t pay them much mind.
Our new exhibition, Frame & Flora, may change that.
Conceived and designed entirely by our staff, Frame & Flora invites guests to see the Garden as art and with an artist’s eye for texture, color, composition, light, and nuance. We’ve outlined 15 scenes around the property with aluminum frames, handcrafted by our staff and meant to focus your attention on each carefully selected vignette.
“What I’m hoping for is that people will pause in those spaces and maybe notice things they overlook,” says Sten Kerwin, the Curator of Arts & Culture.
Planning began about a year ago with specialists from across the organization discussing what stories they wished to tell and which slices of the Garden best illustrated those messages. Benches are placed near some frames, inviting viewers to study landscapes as they might paintings in a museum. “It is artwork,” Kerwin says of the Garden. “It’s beautiful.”
The pieces in our “museum of plants,” however, are more than eye-pleasing adornments. They are functioning ecosystems.
“It’s not like a picture on a wall,” says Eric Foht, Director of Natural Resources. “It’s a living environment.” Expect changes if you return and view the exhibition again.
This is the first time the Preserve, which Foht oversees, has been included in a Garden exhibition. That less-traveled part of the Garden tells stories of restoration, fire, wildlife, and water. Foht hopes that “framing” nature as art will entice guests into the Preserve. “Maybe they’ll see something new—and fall in love with it,” he says.
The frames appear along sandy pathways, like relics left by an unknown civilization, Foht thinks. “Dalí-esque,” is how Vice President of Education & Interpretation Britt Patterson-Weber describes them, likening them to the surrealist Spanish painter. “They just pop up from the landscape,” she says.
The frames do lend a sense of mystery, placed along winding pathways or—in one case—suspended from a tree. Three installments are doorways, like portals to new worlds. Walk through them from one direction and you’ll enter one scene; come from the other direction, and you’ll find yourself somewhere entirely different.
One doorway sits at the junction between the Preserve’s coastal scrub and pine flatwoods habitats. Another, near the Foster Succulent Garden, sets you on a footpath to a wooden swing, nearly hidden amid the shrubbery. From the other direction, you enter into the sunny, arid world of cacti, succulents and the species that coexist with them.
The exhibition also serves as inspiration for home gardeners. Tucked into a grove between the Kapnick Brazilian Garden and Kapnick Caribbean Garden is a collection of container arrangements designed by our horticulturists.
“We’re trying to give people ideas of plant combinations,” explains Assistant Director of Horticulture Andrea Grace. The containers are themed by plant type and include succulents, native plants, and palms. They illustrate the “thriller, spiller, filler” concept of container gardening.
Similarly, the biggest frame in the exhibition, 16 feet wide by 12 feet high, spotlights a plant bed in the Scott Florida Garden that includes a fan palm (Copernicia fallaensis), gulf crotons (Croton punctatus), and Fakahatchee grass (Tripsacum dactyloides), a combination well-suited to Southwest Florida yards.
“I hope people really take time to step back and take in the landscape and really think about all the elements,” Grace said. “It’s intentional and thoughtful how we put plants together.”
While specialists in our Horticulture, Conservation, and Education and Visitor Experience departments selected and readied areas to showcase, the Operations Team constructed and painted the massive frames. Bill Pattison, Special Projects Technician, advised on how to turn the Frame & Flora concept into reality; two staffers with welding experience, Scott Dorris and Billy Letchworth, molded aluminum strips into frames.
“Everybody had a hand in just about every part of this,” Pattison says. “I love we were able to do this whole thing in house.”
It is an exhibition entirely unique to the Garden, Patterson-Weber stresses.
“In other years, we’ve interpreted someone else’s story,” she says. “This is telling our story.”
Experience Frame & Flora now through May 26. This exhibition is included with Garden admission; every ticket and membership purchase supports our conservation efforts.
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