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Homes

Garden of delights an open secret

The Eureka Springs Park and botanical garden offers visitors a tranquil setting and a glimpse of rare and beautiful flora.

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published August 12, 2005

TAMPA - What if you knew of a secret botanical garden, a tropical, shaded, tucked-away place skirted by streams and ponds that bloomed with lilies on a warm summer morning?

Unlike the locked garden in the famous Victorian children's novel The Secret Garden, Eureka Springs Park doesn't require a key.

It features meandering paths and a climate-controlled greenhouse and boasts the largest publicly owned collection of ferns in Florida.

There are no playgrounds, ballfields or boat ramps.

In fact, it's a serious plant lover's treasure and the only botanical garden owned by Hillsborough County.

Yet most people don't know about it.

"In our park system, it's the only thing like this - nothing else holds a candle to it," says Cliff Brown, a park manager and the site's longtime horticultural expert.

The park attracts plant buffs, armchair gardeners, leisurely walkers and numerous local plant clubs that enjoy holding meetings on the serenely beautiful property. It doesn't have the status of the state's big-name botanical gardens, but park officials say they don't want it to.

Butterfly lovers come to see the swallowtail butterflies as big as hummingbirds; birdwatchers covet the peace. Brown even welcomes rare plants from gardening-challenged visitors who want their greenery preserved for posterity.

"Shhh. Do you hear the little wood wren?" he asks one morning as he walks beneath the trees. "That's how quiet it is."

For homeowners wanting to cultivate a natural look in their yards - or for people living in digs too small for their own garden - this is a spot to seek inspiration.

Loads of it.

"We have some very rare stuff - not the kind of varieties you find at the big home stores," Brown explains. "Gardeners come here for the plants. So do artists and painters who like to sit and paint the flowers and the landscape."

The 31-acre park, primarily hardwood swamp set amid cypress, tupelo and maple trees off Eureka Springs Road northwest of the Interstate 4/75 interchange, was once a private garden belonging to Albert Greenberg, a Russian immigrant and onetime salesman who came to Tampa by way of Chicago. An amateur horticulturist and world traveler, Greenberg bought the land in the late 1930s and filled it with plants he acquired on his journeys. He eventually built a house on adjoining property and in 1967 donated his botanical garden to Hillsborough County.

Admirers say it was a true act of public altruism on the part of Greenberg, who died in 1993.

"This was not a deathbed gift," says John Brill, a spokesman for the Hillsborough County Parks, Recreation and Conservation Department. "He was an uncommon man. He didn't do it for tax credit or impact-fee credit. He donated this land when he still had years left to live, when he was still able to come over and walk his dogs."

In fact, Brown, who has worked at Eureka Springs Park since 1980, says Greenberg was so educated and enterprising when it came to plants that he even had a hybrid water lily named after him.

The short, bald, bespectacled philanthropist used to walk his dogs twice a day, taking in the beauty of his donated park, Brown recalls.

"He had a German shepherd mix and a chihuahua," he says. "And he loved plants enough to have created his own private botanical garden. I'm one of the few people left lucky enough to have known him."

When Greenberg donated the land, he stipulated that the park remain a botanical garden and a free attraction to the public.

The county built the greenhouse, a boardwalk and surrounding trellis in the late 1970s. The elevated boardwalk allows visitors to view woods, swamp and what's left of Eureka Springs (reduced greatly in size after the construction of the Tampa Bypass Canal). It's currently being rebuilt and is expected to open next spring, county park officials say.

The greenhouse itself attracts many visitors who come to see the orchids, bromeliads and ferns, particularly in the cool hours of the morning.

There is also a rose garden, arbor and old-Florida-style screened pavilion that draws events from family reunions to weddings.

"A friend brought me here for the first time 20 years ago and I loved the beauty and tranquility of it. I started bringing my kids," said Judy Ciccarello, who was admiring ferns outside the greenhouse with Max DeeSeefano.

"It's peaceful," DeeSeefano said.

Ciccarello nodded: "Not many people know about it - you just don't get many people here. It's so quiet you can just take it all in."

Eureka Springs Park and botanical garden, 6400 Eureka Springs Road, is open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas. The greenhouse is also open from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily. For information or to reserve park facilities for events, call (813) 744-5536.

[Last modified August 11, 2005, 08:56:11]