The cold spell has finally passed and it's pushing 80 so we decided to head down to the Naples Botanical Gardens. We were there for the first time back in
2007 and at that time it had only been open for about three years, they said that they had some grand plans for it so we couldn't
wait to get down there to see what it was like now. The highlight before was their butterfly house, it was a long winding enclosed structure that was totally tree lined with a canopy of branches over head. It was filled with a wide variety of butterfly's, humming birds and a small bird similar to the humming bird called a honey suckle. Not anymore, they have a new butterfly house but their were only about ten butterflies in it, no birds, no hatching cocoons and it was about a third the size of the old one. The other so called improvements were that they paved
most of the trails put in a fountain and some, I guess you would call sculptures. We walked around the entire gardens and their were very few different species of flowers, as Cathy described it, it was like walking around the hotel grounds at Disney World. All we can say is that we're glad it was part of botanical garden membership so it was free and all it cost us was a bit of our time.
wait to get down there to see what it was like now. The highlight before was their butterfly house, it was a long winding enclosed structure that was totally tree lined with a canopy of branches over head. It was filled with a wide variety of butterfly's, humming birds and a small bird similar to the humming bird called a honey suckle. Not anymore, they have a new butterfly house but their were only about ten butterflies in it, no birds, no hatching cocoons and it was about a third the size of the old one. The other so called improvements were that they paved 
most of the trails put in a fountain and some, I guess you would call sculptures. We walked around the entire gardens and their were very few different species of flowers, as Cathy described it, it was like walking around the hotel grounds at Disney World. All we can say is that we're glad it was part of botanical garden membership so it was free and all it cost us was a bit of our time.
1 comment:
I was just here on Saturday with my family (some of who had also seen the original Garden years back) and we had quite a different reaction. It took us about two hours to wander through the three Gardens and check out all there was to see - we didn't even get to the preserve paths. Though the volunteers there told us some of the blooms were a bit stunted by the cold, they also said the plants would recover in the next couple of weeks.
In the end, we all left feeling like we'd just visited a different country having spendt time in gardens from the Caribbean and Brazil in one afternoon!
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