Marie Selby Gardens

This is a real easy one to drive by without noticing, it's off of US-41 in the middle of an S-turn and on a side street that just looks like a residential street, it turns out that the society owns the entire street. This is without a doubt our favorite garden so far, it covers about 13 acres right on the bay,

has two homes one is the visitors center and gift shop the other is a museum on one floor and the main floor is where local artist have their art shows. There is a coffee shop and two small cafes and tons of benches around to just sit and relax. Following the pathway we went through many different types of gardens, through around and under the banyan trees, there is also a green house where they sell many of the plants that they have on the grounds. There was really just to much stuff here to write about it all and I could have posted another dozen or so pictures and still not have covered it properly.


Banyon Tree,
Air plants on a live oak,
Tree with a root system like an octopus ,
Rainbow trunk,
Tree with a bunch of sharp tacks on its truck.





After we left I got mixed up in traffic and we ended up back on Long Boat Key, so we went south this time and ended up at South Lido Park, so we got the picnic basket out and grabbed a table. We had a nice picnic lunch with about a dozen squirrels that decided to join use to see what they could get, after lunch we took a little walk on the beach around the point. The first thing we came across was a kid fishing and he had caught a small shark, about 12-14 inches long, he was trying to figure out how to get the hook
out with out putting his hand near its mouth, after about a minutes it bite through the line and swam away. A hundred yards father down we found a bunch of jelly fish washed up on the shore, sure makes you want to go swimming at this beach, get stung or bite your choice. We also watched a red tail hawk hover for about 2-minutes before making a dive into the water from about 40-feet to get a fish. A pretty interesting little walk for us.