Miami Beach Botanical Gardens

It's strange how gardens are staged. I sat in on one of those round table lunch lectures at UT by a professor specializing in historical European landscapes and gardens (I don't remember her name) and all evidence and discussion was about the symmetry and strict organization of them.
  

   “Man is all symmetry,
Full of proportions, one limb to another,
     And all to all the world besides.
     Each part may call the farthest, brother;
For head with foot hath privat amity,
    And both with moons and tides.”
Geroge Herbert, 1633. Stanza 1 of “Man.”

The gardens of vast estates, kept pristine; women would 'take turns' about the garden.

From the patio/porch/terrace space behind the house, one could see the whole garden as a sort of middle ground between civilization (architecture, living indoors) and wilderness. These gardens did not try to mimic nature, that was not their purpose.


I don't remember where I examined Asian gardens however. It may have been at this lunch lecture, but I somehow feel like it was elsewhere. Anyway, these gardens were designed in a different way. Some sought to mimic nature in a way...as if to bring all these small, precious moments and views one experiences in nature into one, idealized perfect view. The end result would be that the explorer would be in awe of natural beauty, perhaps not knowing it had actually been staged that way.


Botanical Gardens are unmistakably staged. I walked in through the gates and met a mounted map that labeled the different lands and physical features. The fountain at this entrance was name for Morris Lapidus; this fact made me smile.


There were big bright heads in small manicured lawns if you took the path to the right. Smallish-women’s figures, made of metal, were posed here and there.


The structure in the middle was a breezeway, with orchid and vegetable green house gardens on one side. The other side had an interior gathering space for weddings and things like that.


This corridor lead straight into another procession, marked by large, stone things that weren’t quite columns. I liked where this was going and wondered where it was taking me. Then bam! On the left, a magnificent stone bench. It was serious, heavy, textury. No sooner did I sit on the bench (with complete disregard to any level of comfort it may or may not have possessed) I spotted another colorful super head. It had a plant coming out of it; it was red. Up close and isolated from the other garden heads, this one had a different, new attitude.


….But wait, I was in a procession, going towards something. So I stepped back into the path and made my way. No more fun distractions. It actually lead to nothing really, just a green field. I could see this from the beginning, but somehow I thought upon arrival there would be more. Something to catch my eye that I couldn’t have seen until I got there. Maybe it was for weddings and things like that.


A Japanese garden was hidden in the botanical gardens too. It including everything a Japanese garden should include: bright red wooden bridge, slate-grey river stones, grated sand, bamboo, and bonsais.


Maybe the garden was trying too hard. So what. It was absolutely lovely and a refreshing break from my painful, tired bike ride. It can pretend to be a place of discovery with its small, meandering pathways and ‘hidden’ moments if it wants to be because I’ll play along.