Sunken Gardens graced by new growth

The 4-acre garden, refurbished by the city of St. Petersburg, is blooming after years of neglect. Now officials must decide how to cultivate its future.

By LENNIE BENNETT

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 20, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- The camellias are again in full flower, liberated after years of slow strangulation by potato vines. The turtles, gathered from their random existence around the property into their own pond, sun themselves beside water lilies sending shoots up from submerged pots. The flamingos preen their feathers, returned from off-white to blush pink, nourished by vitamins and a shrimp-rich diet.

Sunken Gardens on an early spring day is waking from a longer sleep than winter's dormancy. After languishing under private ownership for years, it reopened in early January, this time as a city park, to positive reviews and healthy attendance numbers: 8,800 visitors during its first month, 2,600 during the first week in February.

At $4 for adults, $3 for seniors and $1 for children 3 through 12, city admission fees are lower than those charged when it was a for-profit attraction and asked $14 for adults and $8 for children.

Sunken Gardens was opened in 1935 by George Turner Sr. Until the Turner family closed it in 1999, it had the distinction of being the oldest family-run attraction in Florida. For decades it flourished, but after the early 1970s, Sunken Gardens fell on increasingly slow times as development along the coasts and in Central Florida exploded.

Small and dated, it was a quaint sideshow compared with the razzle-dazzle of Busch Gardens and Disney World. By the late 1990s, attendance plummeted. The Turner family was unable to sell it to a private buyer for an acceptable price or to afford the manicured maintenance of its early glory days, when as many as 2,000 people a day would visit.

Developers sniffed around, suggesting it be razed for commercial or residential projects. There was a proposal to turn it into a nudist resort. After an emotional campaign waged by local advocacy groups, it was saved from probable demise by a referendum mandating a one-time tax for its purchase.

The city bought 4 acres of gardens, parking lots and a 55,000-square-foot building at 1825 Fourth St. N for $2.9-million in September and embarked on a three-month refurbishment of the gardens. The building was temporarily mothballed until the city opened the gates again last month.

It is, in more ways than one, a garden in transition.

At this point, Sunken Gardens is part of the city-subsidized park system, open Wednesday through Sunday.

City officials, though agreeing to the city's temporary management of Sunken Gardens, were unsure they wanted to take on permanent responsibility for the attraction. A task force was formed to evaluate more than a dozen proposals from community groups and for-profit companies that wanted to manage all or part of the garden. They narrowed the list down to three options and hired Wade-Trim, a Tampa consulting firm, to execute a feasibility study on them. That report was recently released to the Sunken Gardens task force. It evaluates the three options for Sunken Gardens, which are:

Keep it as it is now, under the city's full aegis.

Develop a partnership between the city and Great Explorations, the Hands On Museum, which is temporarily located at The Pier and is seeking a permanent home and more space. It wants about half of the building.

Turn the entire property over, under a lease agreement, to Butterfly Kingdoms Inc., a for-profit company in South Carolina that is building a butterfly attraction in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

All three proposals allow for retail and restaurant space.

The Sunken Gardens task force meets Tuesday to discuss the consultant's report. They are expected to make a recommendation to the City Council. The council could put the issue on its agenda as early as March and make a decision.

Mary Campbell is the parks operation manager and has overseen Sunken Gardens' initial restoration. As a manager, she must concern herself with budgets and marketing plans, of which she has a ready command. She believes Sunken Gardens, more than any other city park, has the potential to be self-sustaining.

"If we continue this trend, we're going to cover 60 percent to 70 percent of our operating costs through admissions," she says, projecting that revenue to be about $350,000 out of a $600,000 budget.

"Other ways to make the garden self-sustaining are with merchandising, fee classes, private functions, sponsors. Those are all possibilities. We also think Great Explorations would add a lot to what we have to offer." She is careful to stress that until a decision is made about its long-term disposition, she is happy to act only as an interim caretaker.

"We all want to see what would be best for the community," she says.

But Campbell, a botanist with a master's degree in horticulture from University of Florida, clearly enjoys shaping the garden's new aesthetic.

"We wanted to take this historic garden and bring it back," she says, following the footpaths George Turner began to install more than 70 years ago when he opened his citrus grove as a tourist attraction after years of amateur experimentation with plants.

The vision for the new Sunken Gardens, if it remains in city hands, would be to establish garden areas showcasing collections of plant types, demonstration gardens and educational programs. The backbone of the garden would be the old paths and ponds, trees and shrubs -- "the plants that George Turner loved," Campbell says.

Like all interesting gardens, the original Sunken Gardens was idiosyncratic, cultivated by its creator's singular vision.

Turner's garden turned its back on the realities of Florida's scrubby landscape in the 1920s.

The land was already possessed of a century-old stand of live oaks when he purchased it in 1903. He added loamy soil derived from the drained lake bottom at the center of the property. The combination was pay dirt for the tropical and subtropical species Turner planted: exotic flowering shrubs and trees such as bougainvillea and travelers-trees -- large relatives of birds of paradise -- and more familiar specimens such as royal palms and magnolias.

Most of them have survived, and Campbell says that plant evaluations have indicated that they're in good condition.

Some past plantings were unfortunate choices -- tropical creepers, especially the potato and syngonium vines -- were out of control. When the city took over the gardens, the parks crew declared war on them, yanking out as much of the invasive plants as they could. Deadwood was removed from trees. Beds were cleared. Healthy plants were pruned back to encourage new growth. The crew began a daily maintenance program that included removal of droopy foliage and dead-heading, the tedious job of cutting off spent blooms from flowering plants. Ten thousand annuals were planted for seasonal color, along with hundreds of perennials such as ginger and azaleas.

The attention shows.

"This is exquisite," said Mary Peck, a Redington Beach resident who brought her daughter, Christine West, who lives in Tampa, and Martha Zani, a cousin visiting from Massachusetts.

"I moved here in 1953," said Peck. "In all my years here, I never went to Sunken Gardens. I came today because I knew it wasn't just an old-fashioned tourist attraction anymore."

Roger and Vivianne Quintal of Quebec come to St. Petersburg every year. They had not seen Sunken Gardens in four decades.

"The newspaper said it had changed," Quintal said. "It's beautiful. Cleaner and nicer than it used to be."

"We're already planning to come back," said Christine West. "We're interested in learning about plants."

Unlike the old Sunken Gardens, which had tourist-oriented entertainment acts, the new garden emphasizes learning and teaching, though Campbell is mindful of public opinion.

"The two things we heard when we first opened," said Campbell, "were "Where are the birds?' and "Where are the alligators?' So we added them."

A bird show in the afternoons, called Comedy Safari, is mostly entertainment, but the kitschy acts such as alligator wrestling have been banished. Doug Scull, a teacher who is designing a children's program for the garden, donated an alligator that is only a passive presence, not part of a show. A butterfly garden has been planted. All the ponds have been drained, cleaned and sealed, and a new system now filters and recirculates the water. A recently installed hibiscus garden of one-of-a-kind hybrids is flowering as are dozens of orchids, installed along new fencing. Twice-daily docent tours and weekend workshops are conducted by horticulturists, animal experts and teachers such as Scull.

Even on weekday mornings, the parking lot fills quickly. A tour bus from Lakeland pulls up, disgorging about 40 men and women.

"We've never been here. We heard about it on television," said Sylvia Jean Richardson, the group's coordinator. "We thought it sounded very nice."

Two young mothers push strollers and stop in front of the flamingos.

"I'd heard they'd made a lot of improvements," said Toni Marsila, who brought her son Augie, 2.

"I never came before," said Kati Samon. "It's something to do with children. And it's not expensive."

"Now that they've lowered the price," said Janet Blair, who brought her daughter, Zoe Blair Andrews, 3, "we can come more often. We voted for the city to buy it and I'm glad."

Bill Heller, dean of University of South Florida -- St. Petersburg, is chairman of the Sunken Gardens task force. He has reviewed the consultant's report and says, "At this point they're not telling us one option is better than another.

"If you look at the financial aspects, Butterfly Kingdoms would leave the city with the least financial exposure. But they're projecting high levels of attendance that may not be realistic," Heller says. Representatives from Butterfly Kingdoms could not be reached for comment.

"The major thing with the city keeping it is the subsidy," he said.

All city-owned parks are subsidized to some extent, said nature park supervisor Ken Yancey, "though we don't really call them subsidies since it's all part of our budget."

The department's $11.6-million budget is spent maintaining and improving the 128 parks and "parklets" within the system and providing services such as education programs and camps.

Boyd Hill, the largest at 800 acres, had a 1999 budget of $942,000 and revenues of $140,000, a difference of about $800,000, said Yancey. Sunken Gardens' subsidy this year is estimated at about $260,000.

Jay Lasita sits on both the City Council and the Sunken Gardens task force.

"My initial feeling about the city operating it was negative," he said. "But after seeing the work Mary Campbell has done and the dedication of the crews, it was like a rebirth. I've gone from being an opponent to believing strongly that the parks should operate it."

His major concern is the size of the subsidy.

"I'm okay with a modest subsidy, maybe $50,000," Lasita said. "But I don't want this to become a financial black hole. I also believe that between a gift shop, Great Explorations and maybe a restaurant, part, if not all, of a subsidy can be offset."

"There is always in February, some one day," wrote the celebrated 19th century gardener Gertrude Jekyll, "when one smells the yet distant but surely coming spring."

Mary Campbell stands beneath the canopy of a 200-year-old oak and takes the full measure of the landscape. She knows she may not be the architect of Sunken Garden's long-term development. Still, like most gardeners, she dreams and plans.

"I'd like more animals, more water gardens with fish. We want to develop a volunteer program for docents, develop a plant database. We want the flamingos' beach to slope more so they can walk into their pond. We're hoping this might turn out to be a bird-watching area. I'd like to work with a group like Audubon."

An overnight rain has glossed new growth emerging on shrubs and trees.

"Everything is about to flush out now that it's warming up," Campbell says, stroking the soft underside of a ginger leaf. "I can't wait."

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