A Hour at Fairchild | Part I

It’s really difficult to visit Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens in only an hour, but we did. Thankfully we were already familiar with the park otherwise I can’t imagine recommending anyone not familiar to visit it in only an hour. Really, you should spend half the day there if possible. It’s even more fun when they have their tropical ice cream vendors there!

We started off with the vines on the west side of the park near the road. This is a chalice vine, a succulent-like vine that we once grew in our garden in Ft. Lauderdale. I wrote about the jade vine over on Sprout Dispatch on Monday.

I’m not sure how I feel about this installation that is going on under the vines. A group of tourists pointed out a sign that stated Yoko Ono had started the Wishing Grove at the garden. Part of me likes it, part of me thinks it is tacky.

We cut through the cactus garden and stopped for a few photos, particular for this cactus which we have in our garden here. It’s a native to the Florida Keys and did not take kindly to our wet and cold winter. We covered it but there was some heavy damage. I don’t think we’ll ever see it get this large in our garden.

We didn’t get a chance to hit up the other baobab trees in south Florida other than the ones here at the garden, so I took the chance to give it a hug. I hug my favorite trees (two other favorites in the garden are the rainbow eucalyptus and the Bailey’s palms).

One of the Bailey’s palms.