travel tales: blow-tanical gardens

as many of you know, i enjoy photographing flowers.

so, it should come as no surprise that one of the things i was looking forward to doing while on vacation was snapping shots of exotic, not-indigenous-to-toronto flora while down south. i imagined all kinds of bizarre, beautiful flowers just waiting for me to take their picture.

but the pickins were somewhat slim, in terms of the flowers we came across in our day to day activities so, on my final evening, my mom and i decided to visit the florida botanical gardens. it sounded ideal – acres and acres of gardens, and FREE admission! perfect! we figured going late in the day would be best because we wouldn’t: 1. die of heat stroke, 2. die of sun stroke, 3. be forced to endure large crowds of people, some of whom might want to stroke us, each other or, you know, themselves.

the park closes at 7pm nightly, so we drove up just after 5pm, figuring 90 minutes or so of wandering among botanical splendor would be just right.

but we should have known from the get-go that this field trip was destined to be one massive FAIL. the parking lot was completely empty. not “there were only a few cars.” COMPLETELY EMPTY. not a single car.

we parked, and then decided to begin our visit with a stop at the visitor’s center so that we might pick up a map, locate the washrooms for reference and get our bearings. we walked to its front doors – locked. lights off. nobody home. we looked at the hours: closed at 5pm. awesome.

nonetheless, we decided to be intrepid explorers and to head into the park ourselves. we were mildly alarmed at the number of posted signs cautioning against alligators, and the entire place was located in what appeared to be a very lush, somewhat unmanaged forest, but we consulted a pathside map of the grounds to determine where we were and where we wanted to, and then pressed on...

... through the completely desolate, deserted and seemingly abandoned park.

there was no one there. not a single person. ANYWHERE. no visitors, no staff, nobody. at first, it was kind of interesting, being the only people around... and then it just got creepy. all the fountains and artificial streams/waterworks had been turned off and, based on the bone-dry cement and piping, hadn’t been on in quite a while.

the only thing missing was a tumbleweed or two blowing through.

we walked amid the “gardens,” which were small and boring and sparsely populated with flowers. there were tons and tons of palm trees and leafy hedges all over the place, but flowers? a few sprinkled here and there, looking anemic and thirsty. the gazebos and seating areas were barren, and a stop in the “wedding garden” produced only a thoughtful engraving about the meaning of love.

as we carried on, getting more and more fed up and disillusioned as we went, i could tell mom was getting nervous. the complete lack of people was starting to freak her out – there was nothing to prevent some psychotic weirdo from leaping out at us from some bushes, for example, and the whole place was giving off a weird this-could-be-the-setting-for-a-horror-movie vibe – so almost as soon as we began our walk in, we turned around to head back out.

i took exactly four photos, including the iris you see above. in hindsight, i should have snapped some of the vast emptiness around us, just for use with this blog entry, but “photographing disappointment” wasn’t high enough on my priority list, i guess. on our way across a bridge over one of the many marshes in the park, we looked down to see two large, moss-covered turtles swimming just below the surface of the very-murky water.

and that was the sum total of our exciting sightings.

to be fair, we did see a few signs saying something to the effect of “please excuse us during our renovation,” so maybe we should have expected a decidedly under-construction environment. instead, we completed our entire visit – sweaty from the lingering heat and dejected from the underwhelmingness of it all – in approximately 30 minutes, and managed to make it home early enough to catch the final half-hour of that day’s Ca$h Cab.