Payne, Christy, Mansion

About this property

The Marie Selby Botanical Gardens is a 15-acre (6.1 ha) botanical garden located at 900 South Palm Avenue in Sarasota, Florida. The Gardens are located on the grounds of the former home of Marie and William Selby. The Marie Selby Botanical Gardens is a Smithsonian affiliate and accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. The Gardens feature preserved collections of epiphytes, feature more than 20,000 living plants, including 5,500 orchids, 3,500 bromeliads, and 1,600 other plants. The living collection is accompanied by an herbarium, with dried and preserved specimens of tropical flora; the world's second-largest spirit collection consisting of vials of mostly orchid flowers in preservative fluids; and a library. More than 150 expeditions to the tropics and subtropics have contributed to these collections. Selby Gardens' botanists have discovered or described more than 2,000 previously unknown plant species. The Gardens maintain banyans, bamboo, live oaks, palms, mangroves, succulents, wildflowers, cycads, bromeliads, a butterfly garden, a fragrance garden, an edible garden, and a koi pond, on a site bordering Sarasota Bay. The interactive Ann Goldstein Children's Rainforest Garden is designed to help children develop a lifelong appreciation for rainforest plants. The Mulford B. Foster Bromeliad Identification Center was established in 1979 in honor of Mulford Foster, one of the leading bromeliad collectors, to provide information on the horticultural and botanical aspects of the Bromeliaceae. It maintains taxonomic files for over 2800 species, genera, and subfamilies, and houses more than 2,000 photographic slides for use by individuals, institutions, and societies. It is supported by local and international bromeliad societies. Greenhouses contain over 10,500 accessions in more than 600 genera representing 92 plant families, including 4900 orchids, 3600 bromeliads, 660 aroids, 240 ferns, 140 gesneriads, and 1,300 other plants. Gardens contain approximately 2,300 recorded tropical and subtropical plantings, representing some 1,200 species, 620 genera, and 165 plant families. A significant portion is well-documented, voucher species collected from native habitats. The Herbarium contains approximately 106,000 specimens of tropical flora, largely neotropical, with an emphasis on epiphytes. Ecuador flora and flora of the Andes are well represented. Current collections of families, with number of types for each, is: Orchidaceae (1,200), Bromeliaceae (109), Gesneriaceae (105), Araceae (62), Marantaceae (16), Heliconiaceae (14), and miscellany (61). The Orchid Identification Center was established in 1975 to study and curate wild-collected and conservatory-grown orchids, and to serve as a center for their identification. It has amassed more than 20,000 taxonomic reference files, a collection of photographs, and 24,000 spirit-preserved specimens, with particular strengths in collections from Mexico, Central America, Andean South America, and Venezuela.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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