Exhibits are glimpse of where the wild things grow
Botanical Gardens transport visitors to the tropics
Venture to the swamps of Florida and the rain forests of Panama. You can do just that within mere steps — and stay right in South Buffalo.
The Buffalo & Erie County Botanical Gardens recently opened two new exhibits — the Florida ecosystem and the epiphytes of Panama’s cloud forest. Eight more exhibits are planned to be built by 2016.
“One of our goals at the gardens is to transport you into tropical environments,” said Erin Grajek, the gardens’ director of marketing. “People who can’t go to Florida can come here and see what it’s all about, see the vegetation, touch it, feel it and smell it.”
There is a theme to these new exhibits, and it all comes back to Buffalo. The city is located on the 79th longitude, or meridian, and all 10 exhibits at the garden were selected from sites that are located on Buffalo’s meridian.
Florida’s contrast with Buffalo made it an easy selection. Other U. S. locations on the meridian didn’t differ as much.
The Florida exhibit begins with a grassland marsh full of love grass and horsetails and leads into the mangroves.
“Everything here is native,” said Jeanette Williams, a volunteer at the Botanical Gardens for 20 years.
Williams traveled to Florida to pick out the plants a year ago.
“[The plants] came up on a semitruck one day, and we unloaded them and planted them,” Grajek said. “So we really did transport Florida here.”
Above the swamps of Florida are the canopy trees of Panama’s rain forest. Panama’s cloud forest, so named because of its high altitude, allows visitors to wander 200 feet into the trees without ever leaving the ground.
“What you’re actually doing here is you’re standing in a canopy to see all these beautiful flowers,” Williams said.
The cloud forest features bromeliads and orchids.
“This is more naturally how [the flowers] are growing in the trees,” Williams said.
Visitors can see different vegetation and also how far they are from native habitat.
“We will have mile markers that will be added to all of our exhibits as we go, so it’ll actually show you how many miles you are from Buffalo,” Grajek said.
The two exhibits are now initiating new construction, and construction began last week on a 46-car parking lot, which was announced in February by Mayor Byron W. Brown and County Executive Chris Collins.
Work on the lot was supposed to have started in the fall, along with the new administrative building.
“[The parking lot is] scheduled to be completed by the end of the summer,” Grajek said. “Adjacent to that, we will start construction on an administrative building with all our growing houses, work areas and our storage areas.”
The expansion of the center with new exhibits is the realization of the conservatory’s original intent when it opened in 1900.
“The concept of it, originally, literally, was to bring the tropics to those who couldn’t travel across the world,” Grajek said. “Traveling was so hard [in the early 1900s].”
Williams explained that, in those days, people built conservatories for that sole purpose.
Other exhibits will include landscapes of Peru, the Galapagos Islands, Southwest Australia, Asia and Russia.
And now with two pieces of the master plan completed, all the conservatory’s workers and volunteers can do is wait for the rest to fall into place.
Grajek said she can’t wait to stand inside the finished product.
“I dream about it being completed,” Grajek said. “I think about how cool it’ll be for this area and what a place it’ll be to come and visit and see.”
