Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Robert H. Montgomery, an accountant who collected plants, founded it in 1936 and named it for his friend David Fairchild, the plant explorer who brought more than seventy-five thousand plants into the United States, mangoes and varieties of cotton and wheat among them. William Lyman Phillips laid out the grounds on principles of variety, consistency and contrast, using shade and changing path widths so that the garden reveals itself in stages rather than all at once. The collections are serious: the largest tropical bamboo holding in the world at a hundred and twenty-five species, and the Montgomery Palmetum, which holds more documented palm specimens than anywhere else. There are rare cycads, orchids and bromeliads. Wings of the Tropics is a butterfly conservatory inside the twenty-five thousand square foot Clinton Family Conservatory, and a two-acre Amazon rainforest with waterfalls sits within the garden. Orchid, mango, chocolate and butterfly festivals run through the year. It has forty-five thousand members and over twelve hundred volunteers