Tropical Conservatory, Marie Selby Botanical Gardens

Marie Selby Botanical Gardens occupies, on Sarasota Bay, the former property of Marie and William Selby. Selby House, their original residence, dates from the early 1920s according to the garden's website; the Payne Mansion, in Colonial Revival style, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 25 September 1998. According to Wikipedia, the research library began with a request from William Cole's estate in 1973 and opened in 1975, the year of the Orchid Identification Center. The garden presents the present Tropical Conservatory as one of its eight greenhouses; it says the public can currently see less than 5 percent of its living research collections.

The campus master plan, unveiled in October 2017, had a bumpy road: the city commission rejected it by 3 votes to 2 in November 2019, and a scaled-back version was approved by 4 votes to 1 in early 2021. Phase One broke ground in June 2021 and opened in January 2024, with a welcome center, plant research facilities, a 450-space parking garage, a restaurant and a garden shop. Phase Two comprises a new Conservatory Complex, a learning pavilion and gardens; work began in December 2025 and vertical construction was announced on 11 August 2026, with opening set for November 2028, later than the late-2027 target first given. A Phase Three is to restore the two historic buildings, link the paths and strengthen the seawalls. None of the texts consulted says what will become of the present greenhouse.

The garden names the present Tropical Conservatory as one of its eight greenhouses; the page for the 2026 orchid show calls it the Display Conservatory. On OpenStreetMap it appears as a separate building within a rectangle of about 50 m by 40 m, south of the Payne Mansion. Free photographs taken inside in March 2017 show a translucent covering on white metal glazing bars, above a path edged with pools and a timber pergola; they carry no caption naming the building.

The future Conservatory Complex is on another scale. Sarasota Magazine gives it 32,605 square feet (about 3,030 m²); Selby Gardens describes a hurricane-resilient design, named the Selby System, that uses lightweight polycarbonate glazing rather than glass to reduce structural weight and was tested at full scale in 2026 under simulated hurricane conditions. It aims to exceed usual greenhouse standards and meet the 2023 Florida Building Code for publicly occupied buildings. Sweet Sparkman Architecture & Interiors is the architect, OLIN the landscape studio and TY Lin Silman the structural engineer; Willis Smith Construction manages the build.

The Sarasota campus calls itself the only botanical garden in the world devoted to the display and study of epiphytic orchids, bromeliads, gesneriads, ferns and other tropical plants. In the Tropical Conservatory it shows orchids and bromeliads, many of them collected in tropical forests by its scientists; the displays change with what is in bloom.

According to Wikipedia, whose figures are undated, the greenhouses hold more than 10,500 accessions in over 600 genera and 92 families, including 4,900 orchids, 3,600 bromeliads, 660 aroids, 240 ferns and 140 gesneriads. Each autumn the garden stages a major orchid show; the 2026 edition, by Christian Sampson, runs from 10 October to 6 December in the museum, the gardens and the Display Conservatory, after the 2024 (PURPLE) and 2025 (Rebecca Louise Law) editions. The future complex is meant to show more than 20,000 plants from the research collections, nearly all of them, according to Selby.

The Tropical Conservatory is visited with admission to the Sarasota campus, open daily, and the garden states that special-occasion photography is not permitted there. It combines with the Banyan Grove, some of whose trees were planted by the Selbys nearly a century ago, the Bromeliad Garden, the fern garden, the mangrove walkway along the bay and the Museum of Botany & the Arts in the Payne Mansion.

Phase Two works are under way on the campus.