[ By Kiley Kornegay ]

McKee Botanical Garden — A Secret Garden Saved

McKee Jungle Gardens in Vero Beach was created during a time when the name "Florida" evoked images of an exotic, tropical environment. Originally containing over 40 varieties of rubber trees, 110 varieties of palms, America's largest collection of tropical water lilies growing outdoors, 200 varieties of ferns, and wild orchids in profusion, McKee Jungle Gardens was one of the first public gardens in Florida, and one of the state's earliest tourist attractions. Today, the garden has been reborn and renamed. Deep in the roots of the Vero Beach community, McKee Botanical Garden survives and thrives as an example of environmental stewardship and a community's commitment to the preservation of its heritage and cultural resources.

National Historic Landmarks are places where significant historical events occurred or where prominent Americans worked or lived. Representing ideas that shaped the nation, the designation automatically lists a property in the National Register of Historic Places (NR). While National Register properties may have local or statewide significance, NHLs, established by Congress in 1935, possess exceptional value or quality in illustrating and interpreting for the inspiration and benefit of all Americans the heritage of the United States as a whole. The law requires of NHLs a very high level of historic integrity, enabling public interpretation.

In 1922, the McKee-Sexton Land Company purchased an 83-acre tropical hammock of mixed oak and palm along the Indian River in Vero Beach. Cleveland industrialist Arthur G. McKee and Waldo E. Sexton, a pioneer in Indian River Countys' development, were business partners who shared a love of horticulture. They chose to preserve this tract of hammock instead of developing it as an orange grove. For several years, the property was used to experiment with plants, nursery houses and lily ponds, but by 1929, McKee and Sexton decided to create a landscaped botanical garden attraction on the site.

William Lyman Phillips, head of the Florida office of the famed Olmstead Brothers firm, was engaged as the consulting landscape architect to provide a comprehensive layout for the attraction. Phillips was a leading landscape designer in South Florida during the 1930s, and later earned fame as the designer of Miami's Fairchild Tropical Garden.

Phillips proposed that McKee visitors be introduced to the jungle though carefully staged transitions, first entering from the outside world through a vine-enclosed tunnel, then crossing a sunlit, open lawn and finally venturing into the jungle itself. He outlined a network of fairly direct paths throughout the garden, heightening the gloom of the forest by contrasting it with passages of sunlight.

Winton H. Reinsmith, the on-site landscape architect, directed the implementation of Phillips' design. David Fairchild, plant explorer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his staff at Chapman Field station helped Sexton's landscape architects enrich the gardens with exotic plants from around the world, including Chinese fan palms, 40 varieties of rubber trees and Amazonian lily pads large enough to support a small child.

Waldo E. Sexton designed the unusual buildings at McKee. Built of cypress and heart-of -pine, Sexton enhanced his structures with old doors, bells, keys, wide boards, Spanish tiles, portholes, wrought iron, stained-glass windows, and lanterns. His buildings, which include the Driftwood Inn in Vero Beach, have been described as "not so much designed-and-built, as collected-and-assembled."

The Hall of Giants, Sexton's main building at McKee, was built using a pole and beam construction with pine and cypress, carved Spanish doors, stained glass and Sexton's bell collection. Sexton built the hall to house what he billed as, "the world's largest mahogany table." Made of a single plank of mahogany, the table was five feet wide, five inches thick and 35 feet long. Sexton first encountered the table at the St. Louis Exposition when he was just a boy. Years later, he tracked it to a New York basement, bought it, and placed it in the Hall of Giants. On loan for its private owner, the table returns to McKee this summer.