Bonita Springs Florida Weekly

How do their GARDENS GROW?

The challenges and triumphs of directing a botanical garden



Above: The Brazil Water Garden at Naples Botanical Garden. COURTESY PHOTOS

Above: The Brazil Water Garden at Naples Botanical Garden. COURTESY PHOTOS

BECAUSE WE SEE BOTANICAL GARDENS as living entities, we don’t consider them as having engines. But they do. These engines are not mechanical, however. They are human, and they take the form of directors. Whether they’re fortunate enough to help develop a fledgling facility, or oversee one that has been around for a century, the directors of botanical gardens navigate their organization’s growth, set the pace, design the culture and leave their mark for visitors, staff and successors to come.

Donna McGinnis

President and CEO

¦ Naples Botanical Garden Naples

About seven months after getting hired, Donna McGinnis’s dream job as president and CEO of Naples Botanical Garden turned into a nightmare. It was 2017, and the facility got hit by Hurricane Irma — badly.

“The Naples Daily News described us as a bowl of chopped salad,” she said.

Construction had just finished at the end of 2016, and Irma knocked out a third of the garden. That was a problem on several levels.

Above left: Edison and Fort Winter Estates.

Above left: Edison and Fort Winter Estates.

“Our garden is really very new still,” Ms. McGinnis said. “It’s only been open 10 years. Being a younger garden, we don’t have a big rainy day fund built up yet. When your collections and display gardens get destroyed, those aren’t insurable, so we had to go through the FEMA process. That was the most challenging window of time because it was such a mess and there was so much damage. I remember having a discussion with our head of horticulture about how we would even get started with this.”

NBG had already made a name for itself, being the youngest garden in history to receive the American Public Gardens Association’s prestigious Award for Garden Excellence.

And Ms. McGinnis was in the right place at the right time. Unlike some garden directors, her background wasn’t in horticulture — but it didn’t need to be.

“My predecessor, Brian Holly, headed this garden for 11 years while it was being built,” she said. “He was head of the garden in Cleveland before he came down to Naples. He’s a horticulturist, masterful designer, and he was the exact right person to look at the 170 acres of nothing and decide what would be built. He took the job of working with the board, selecting the landscape architects, the campaign to raise the funds to get it all done.”

The Naples Botanical Garden. COURTESY PHOTO

The Naples Botanical Garden. COURTESY PHOTO

When Mr. Holly retired at the end of 2016 as the construction phase ended, the board decided to look for someone with more of a business background.

“Brian had built a really strong horticulture team on the staff, so it didn’t have to be a botanist or horticulturist,” Ms. McGinnis said. “What the board decided they were looking for is someone who could build the business side of the organization, build awareness, build attendance, fundraising — those parts of the organization — but also somebody who knew gardens.”

The Naples Botanical Garden. COURTESY PHOTO

The Naples Botanical Garden. COURTESY PHOTO

Armed with an undergrad degree in communications, her experience was primarily with cultural organizations — opera, ballet, museums.

“Museums and gardens have very similar structures, very similar operations,” she said. “I came up through development and fundraising, got an MBA, and moved from museums into gardens.” One of the things she loves about her position is that NBG is both an environmental organization and a cultural institution in the community.

“You get to have your feet in both of those worlds,” Ms. McGinnis said. “You get to do festivals, exhibits, music — all of those kinds of cultural things — but you’re also taking care of a living collection of plants. All of us in botanical gardens are interested in conservation and concerned about climate change, so we have that environmental side, too. From my perspective, you get to do the most interesting stuff. There’s so much you get to be a part of.”

Unlike some gardens, NBG is not connected to an estate, so there is no older flora. Instead, it leans on collections of geographical displays. There’s a Brazilian garden, Caribbean garden, Asian garden — all highlighting tropical and subtropical plants from those parts of the world.

MCGINNIS

MCGINNIS

“We have about 170 acres, half of which is restored preserve, so we can take visitors out to see these natural Florida ecosystems,” Ms. McGinnis said. “What does a pine rockland look like? What does a wetland look like? We can show them right on our own campus. That’s harder for the gardens to do that are in more metro areas that don’t have that kind of land any longer.”

She is grateful to have come on board during the early stages of the garden’s development.

“A lot of gardens have been around for a long time, some for more than 100 years, so to do anything new, you have to let go of something else — or to build something new, you have to tear something out,” Ms. McGinnis said. “But we still have acreage to display gardens later on, and we have this blank page for education programs, conservation, community engagement. You get to be entrepreneurial in a way, which doesn’t come along very often.”

Edison and Ford Winter Estates gardens in Fort Myers. COURTESY PHOTO

Edison and Ford Winter Estates gardens in Fort Myers. COURTESY PHOTO

Debbie Hughes

Horticulture director

¦ Edison and Ford Winter Estates, Fort Myers

“This is not a job,” said Debbie Hughes, horticulture director for the Edison and Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers. “This is not work. This is really my life. We spend a lot of time at our jobs, and it’s a career, but it’s more than that. This is something I feel I was born to do.”

That sounds a bit unusual for someone whose background is in physical therapy. Yes, you read that correctly.

“I was a physical therapist, and I loved science,” she said. “I grew up in a colder climate, in Illinois, and I thought that’s what I wanted to do the rest of my life, but that didn’t happen. I ended up moving to New York, had four children, then moved to Florida. I ended up loving plants so much that I gave up physical therapy and started taking classes in horticulture.”

Debbie Hughes at the Edison and Ford Winter Estates. COURTESY PHOTO

Debbie Hughes at the Edison and Ford Winter Estates. COURTESY PHOTO

Now she considers herself a physical therapist for plants. She’s been doing it at Edison and Ford for 14 years now.

“Physical therapy prepared me for the rigorous work because you have to be strong and passionate about plants,” Ms. Hughes said. “There’s nothing better than to be outside all day long. The plants don’t talk back in the same way people do. They tell you in a different way — you’ll notice the leaves aren’t so green anymore.”

Primarily known for its historic winter homes of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, as well as a museum and the former’s laboratory, the campus also boasts an impressive 20 acres of gardens, boasting more than 1,700 plants representing more than 400 species from six continents.

“You can travel the world in our gardens — China, Brazil, Australia,” Ms. Hughes said. “You name any country, we have a plant from there.”

Because it’s a city facility with no endowment, Ms. Hughes’ biggest challenge is the funding that provides for the upkeep — a common issue for nonprofits during the pandemic. The staff works as hard as they can, she said, but there’s not enough for all the work that must be done.

“You have dreams and ideas about what you want to accomplish, but they’re always hindered by the lack of funding,” she added. “You need that staff to get the work accomplished. You can work 24/7 and still not get it all done.”

The Edison and Ford Estates is one of the region’s older gardens, with some flora that was planted more than a century ago.

“We are always looking for ways to maintain the health of our historical trees,” Ms. Hughes said. “We planted about 100 new trees since Hurricane Irma, and that’s a challenge because they’re like your little children. You worry that they’re not established, that they won’t grow, that they’ll die, after you’ve worked so hard to get them where they should be.”

One of her goals is the restoration of the gardens to their original vision. After taking a trip to Michigan to see the garden there of Ford’s wife, Clara, Ms. Hughes determined she needed to make changes to the Fort Myers garden, to make it look more like Clara would have kept it. She also plans to restore the Moonlight Garden to how it looked when the Edisons lived there.

“You can make gardens pretty, but you have to go past that,” Ms. Hughes said. “You have to make them part of people’s lives. We have great educational programs to teach our community. When people move from somewhere else, they’re usually at a loss for how to garden in Florida, so we teach them. I’m here to teach them, but also help them love their gardens at home.”

On her days off, she visits other gardens, looking for ideas on how she can improve the ones at Edison and Ford. A great believer in continuing education, she is a certified horticulturist and arborist.

“I took a lot of classes, but I think the best way to learn about gardens is through the school of hard knocks, where you actually do the work,” Ms. Hughes said. “That’s the most important part because you see what works and what doesn’t work. You read, you go to classes, you go to conferences, you network with people who are in the business and you learn so much from them.

“I’m not someone who directs everybody else to do the work. I do the work. I do the job I expect my staff to do. If I expect them to do it, I can do it, too.” ¦

In the KNOW

Naples Botanical Garden

4820 Bayshore Drive, Naples
239-643-7275
www.naplesgarden.org

Edison and Ford Winter Estates

2350 McGregor Blvd, Fort Myers
239-334-7419
www.edisonford.org

One response to “How do their GARDENS GROW?”

  1. LINDA PAQUIN says:

    Being a new resident in Bonita Springs, as well as a longtime gardener up north, these 2 articles resonated with me. I can hardly wait to see both of these facilities. Knowing how intricate a job it is, the hard work of these 2 Debbie’s is totally awesome. I cannot wait to visit and enjoy. Thanks for this informative articles.

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