Typically, visitors at the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens pay their admission fee and stroll through the Summer House into 68 acres of lush greenery.
From March 23 to 24, though, they were greeted by more than 175 vendors from around Florida there for the annual Spring Festival.
Just feet away from the Summer House, Kanapaha’s entry point, lay rows of tents. Many of the items in the tents, ranging from homemade candles to flowers and plants, originated abroad, but every booth had an unusual Florida spin.
Rose Petals Nursery in Newberry has the largest collection of Bermudan roses in the Southeast United States. But, the crown jewel of Cydney Wade, a 68-year-old Rose Petals Nursery co-owner, is colloquially known as ‘the Florida rose.’
“It’s technically called a Louis Philippe rose,” she said, gesturing to the hot pink blooms arranged outside her booth, “but it’s been growing here in Florida forever.”
Wade and her husband Art have spent years cultivating countless roses in their nursery. They agreed the Florida rose is by far the most fragrant.
“It’s such a nice, strong smell, it can really knock your socks off,” Wade said. “The old-timers realized how easily it grew here in the Florida climate, so they renamed it the Florida rose and we’ve been calling it that ever since.”
Another booth selling native and exotic plants at the festival was McCrory’s Bromeliads, a family-owned nursery in Eustis. 41-year-old Will McCrory helps maintain the nursery’s 30 acres of bromeliads.
“It was started 47 years ago in Eustis, out near Apopka,” he said. “It’s been family-owned and operated since 1977.”
The key to the nursery’s endurance over the years has been innovation, McCrory said. His family has gradually increased the number of plants they grow every year to ensure they can meet demand.
“We just started putting the plants in moss balls last fall,” he said. “We’re not totally sure how it’s going to work quite yet, but we have to make sure we’re always trying new things.”
In addition to trying new planting techniques, the McCrory family has focused on acquiring new plants to propagate. Amy McCrory, who also works in the nursery, said one of the varieties they had for sale at the festival is so new it hasn’t even been named yet.
“When people discover or create new kinds of plants, they often wait a bit to see how they’ll grow and reproduce before they name them,” Amy said. “This one we brought here today still just has a number, not a name yet.”
The Spring Festival advertises itself as Gainesville’s premiere horticultural event, gathering plant experts and lovers alike from around the state, but flowers and trees are hardly the only thing the festival had to offer. Early Sunday afternoon, Gainesville-based band The Lost Safari Drummers took the stage to perform for festival attendees.
The group’s 11 members, consisting of 10 drummers and an electric guitarist, arranged themselves in two lines on Kanapaha’s circular stage and played songs for the audience, who sat on white, wooden lawn chairs on the grass.
The Lost Safari Drummers have brought songs from Africa to Gainesville since the group’s inception 40 years ago, when 75-year-old Paul Campbell joined and began playing the ashiko.
“It’s based on a Nigerian drum that’s made with machine pieces rather than carved by hand,” Campbell said of the 30-inch drum he beat with his hand during the performance. “It’s kind of a Brazilian adaptation of a Nigerian drum.”
Campbell’s experience with the Lost Safari Drummers began in 1984, when the group made its performance debut at the Oaks Mall. The group’s members have changed and grown since their inaugural show four decades ago, but Campbell said the fire has always been there.
“The spirit of it, the energy, the fire of it, it brings joy to my life. That’s the whole purpose,” he said.
The Lost Safari Drummers, like McCrory’s and the Rose Petals Nursery, take influence from other countries around the world and combine it with home-grown talent to produce things — whether that’s music, flowers or plants —that are undeniably Florida.
Contact Bea Lunardini at blunardini@alligator.org. Follow her on X @bealunardini.
