Roadside Attractions in Florida
2 places
Nature·Monroe County
Nancy Forrester's Garden
Nancy Forrester spent the 1980s turning an acre of Key West's Old Town into a rainforest, planting it as a site-specific artwork meant to teach ecology, with more than 150 species of palm among the orchids and the bromeliads. For most of the time it stood it was the last undeveloped acre in Old Town.
Nature·Monroe County
Sombrero Beach
There is very little sand in the Florida Keys, and the reason is that almost none of it arrives from anywhere else. Mainland Florida's beaches are quartz, carried down by rivers draining the southern Appalachians, and none of that sediment reaches this far out to sea. What the Keys have instead is carbonate, manufactured on the spot by coral, molluscs and the parrotfish that grind them down, and it is fine enough to settle as marl and mangrove flat rather than pile up into a strand.