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. The parrots came afterwards and by accident: the first one arrived when somebody smuggled a bird and its cage into the garden and left it there, and others followed, surrendered by owners who could no longer keep them or who had died before they did. She opened the garden to the public on Christmas Day, 1993, and kept it open every single day of the year, holidays included, for the next fifteen years. Taxes and upkeep caught up with her in 2012, and the parcels were sold and built on. There is a swimming pool where a good part of the rainforest stood. What survived is the back garden on Elizabeth Street, where the sanctuary still operates, and which Forrester now describes as the smallest parrot sanctuary in the country. The birds are the whole point of it now: macaws and Amazons in open-air enclosures under what canopy is left, introduced by name and history in a storytelling hour each morning. A parrot can outlive the person who bought it by decades, which is how most of them got here, and it is why a garden built for plants is now run for birds.