Make sure to check out the butterfly tent when you go. I have gone to Spanish Point a few times since it became part of Selby Gardens, and it is definitely fun to visit. Very different from Selby downtown, and I would say that I prefer it.
There are places in Florida where the past clings to the landscape like morning dew on the edges of a palmetto frond—where you feel time not as an arrow but as a tide, moving forward and back in long, cyclical breaths. Historic Spanish Point, tucked along the shimmering curve of Little Sarasota Bay in Osprey, is one such place.
Every time I visit, I feel like I’m stepping into a living dialogue between land, water, wind, and the rivulets of humanity who have come before—Calusa, pioneer homesteaders, citrus growers, naturalists, fishermen, poets, and the occasional modern wanderer like me who just wants to listen.
And so, on a warm morning when the light filtered through slash pines like gold dust, I went to see what the land would say.
Stepping Onto Ancient Ground
Most Florida adventures begin with something rustling in the underbrush. Mine began with silence—an expectant, almost ceremonial quiet—broken only by the soft shush of the bay lapping the shoreline and an osprey giving a solitary whistle above.
Before I even reached the main entrance, the air told a story: briny, warm, threaded with the sweet, almost tea-like aroma of yaupon holly. Historic Spanish Point isn’t just a museum or botanical garden; it is 4,000 years of human and ecological memory layered in sandy soil.
To walk here is to place your foot over the footprints of ancient hands: the shell middens that rise like pale dunes are not piles of refuse, but archived moments of everyday Calusa life—meals, gatherings, rituals, decisions made with the tides.
As a naturalist, I can’t help but feel the resonance between these old shellworks and the nests of our modern architects of place—wood storks piling sticks into precise platforms, marsh rabbits weaving grass into cradle-cups. Humans have always shaped this peninsula. Spanish Point is where you can feel that truth humming.
The Florida Jungle and Mrs. Palmer’s Dream
Walking into the Jungle Walk is like stepping through a green veil. The temperature drops noticeably, the light softens, and you enter what early settlers must have seen when they first hacked their way down the Gulf Coast—a dense hammock of cabbage palms, gumbo-limbo, and strangler figs twisting around each other like dancers who’ve been waltzing for centuries.
There’s a kind of solemn playfulness in a Florida hammock. Life grows fast and coils even faster. One cabbage palm had fallen, creating a natural archway; beneath it, a parade of anoles puffed up their neon dewlap flags as if greeting me personally.
This is where Bertha Palmer, Chicago socialite turned land baroness, left her mark—not by taming wilderness (as some insisted) but by coaxing beauty out of what was already here. Her garden rooms—sunken gardens, pergolas, aqueducts of stone—are displays of 1910s pioneer ambition blended with tropical landscapes.
In the Fern Walk, Boston ferns erupt under canopies of live oak the color of morning coffee. In my mind I replay the stories I’ve heard of Mrs. Palmer arriving on horseback, surveying the property with a keen eye for possibility. She was, in her own way, a naturalist too—curious, observant, ready to let the land instruct her.
Where the Bay Breathes: Shoreline Explorations
No matter how far inland you walk at Spanish Point, you’re never more than a short stroll from the water. The White Cottage shoreline was calling to me with a quiet insistence.
Down by the bay, I discovered the true orchestra of this place: the popping of pistol shrimp, the warble of red-winged blackbirds among the reeds, the cry of a laughing gull who seemed much too pleased with himself. Blue crabs scuttled sideways along the shallows as if late for an appointment.
When you kneel on the shell-lined shore, you can sift through millennia. Oyster shells ranging from glossy white to deep gray mark ancient layers of abundance. The Calusa didn’t build these middens out of scarcity—they built them from a world overflowing with fish, mollusks, birds, and mangroves thick with life.
A great blue heron stood poised at the edge of the waves like a priest performing a quiet ritual. When he speared a mullet with a movement almost too fast to see, it occurred to me: every organism here is participating in an unbroken heritage of survival stretching back to when Paleo-Indians first camped on these shores.
The heron is no mere bird. He’s a historian.
The Butterfly Garden: A Kaleidoscope on the Wing
If the shoreline is Spanish Point’s heart, then the Butterfly Garden is its pulse.
Stepping into it feels like entering a dream of color—a lively swirl of gulf fritillaries, zebra longwings, and monarchs drifting like petals caught in a slow breeze.
As a naturalist, I linger here far longer than most visitors. Florida’s butterflies are storytellers, each species revealing subtle truths about our shifting ecosystem. Monarch numbers, of course, rise and fall with the health of milkweed. Zebra longwings, whose lazy flight is almost meditative, depend on healthy passionflower vines.
But what I loved most on this visit was a single Atala butterfly, its velvety black wings dotted with blue and trailing a flash of neon orange. The Atala was nearly extinct in the 20th century when Florida’s native coontie plant was over-harvested. Today, thanks to restoration and replanting, they are back—tiny miracles of resilience.
A woman beside me gasped when one landed on her shirt. “It chose you,” I said with a smile.
She beamed. “Do they really do that?”
“Of course,” I told her. “Nature always chooses the curious.”
The Pioneer Past: A Naturalist in the Homesteader’s World
Historic Spanish Point is home not only to ancient shell mounds and lush gardens but also to remarkably preserved pioneer buildings—the kind of structures that remind you Florida wasn’t always condos and citrus groves.
Inside the Guptill House, I ran my fingers along the wooden frame, feeling the roughness of early Florida life. These were families who grew their own food, patched their own sails, kept watch for storms long before satellites existed.
The naturalist in me always pauses longest in pioneer kitchens. There’s something grounding about imagining how intimately early settlers interacted with the land: harvesting yaupon tea, smoking mullet, pressing sugarcane, gathering sea grapes for jelly.
We modern Floridians enjoy sunsets and seafood without considering the long line of human hands that made such ease possible. Here, the air still smells faintly of wood smoke and citrus, as if the place remembers.
Outside, an eastern phoebe perched on the house’s porch railing, tail bobbing rhythmically. Phoebes have nested on pioneer homes for centuries—simple mud cups tucked under eaves and rafters. Seeing one here felt right, like a living bookmark tucked in the pages of time.
The Sunken Garden: Where Stone Meets Wildness
Every naturalist has a favorite nook—a place that feels like an inner sanctum. At Spanish Point, mine is the Sunken Garden.
You descend a shaded stone pathway that sweeps in a subtle spiral, bringing you into an oasis that feels both cultivated and wild. Bright bromeliads cling like jeweled ornaments to oak branches above. Water trickles from a limestone fountain, adding a subtle quiet to the air.
I sat on one of the old stone benches and watched a pair of white ibis probing through the leaf litter with elegant nonchalance. Their pink legs looked almost translucent in the filtered light.
But the real magic is the interplay between structure and wilderness. Mrs. Palmer’s gardeners built this space more than a century ago, yet the tropical hammock has flowed back into it like a tide—ferns creeping over stair edges, moss softening old bricks, tendrils of airplants reaching skyward like green prayers.
Humans shape nature; nature reshapes humans. Spanish Point is the negotiation.
The Magic of the Pergola: A Naturalist’s Cathedral
When I approached the Pergola, a long ribbon of stone columns overlooking the bay, the midday light was beginning its slow turn toward afternoon gold. Shadows lengthened across the walkway like the ribs of a great stone creature.
I call the Pergola a naturalist’s cathedral. Instead of stained glass, you have the gleam of the bay. Instead of pipe organs, the wind hums through the rafters. Instead of incense, the air is perfumed with salt, sun-warmed seaweed, and the faint sweetness of blooming spider lilies.
Standing there, I watched a single black vulture rise on a thermal, wings spread like a dark blessing. Vultures, often maligned, are the unacknowledged monks of Florida—they keep the world clean, their soaring flight a reminder that beauty often hides in the misunderstood.
Below me, a school of tiny sardines rippled the shallows in synchronized silver. A needlefish sliced through like a living arrow.
This is why naturalists come here—not for spectacle, but for subtlety.
Where Time Braids Itself: A Moment of Stillness
Near the end of my wanderings, I stopped at one of the smaller shell middens. There was no sign, no crowd—just a rise in the earth, shaded by a tangle of live oaks, Spanish moss swaying gently.
I placed my hand on the mound. The shells were cool under my palm.
Here lay centuries of meals, decisions, storms weathered, families raised. This hill of shells was not abandoned debris—it was ancestry. It was identity. It was the Calusa speaking through the medium of place.
As a Florida naturalist, I’m often reminded that we do not inherit the land; we momentarily join the long procession of observers who witness it. From the first indigenous shell-gatherers to the pioneers to modern explorers, all of us have stood in some version of this silence, listening to the heartbeat of the bay.
Departure: Leaving Without Leaving
As the sun began lowering toward the horizon, I made my way back toward the entrance. I passed blooming muhly grass glowing pink in the late light, and a pair of osprey circling high overhead—sentinels of the estuary.
Historic Spanish Point always leaves me feeling gently rearranged, as if the landscape has whispered some instruction about how to live—slower, more attuned, rooted in curiosity.
On the way out, an elderly man nodded at me.
“Beautiful day,” he said.
“It is,” I replied. “This whole place feels alive.”
He smiled knowingly. “It always has been.”
And that is the quiet truth: Spanish Point is not a museum. It is a living archive of Florida’s ongoing conversation with time—one that includes indigenous ancestors, pioneer families, the opulence of the 1910s, and visitors like me who still bend down to admire the story held in a single shell fragment.
As I stepped back into the modern world, the bay breeze still clung to my shirt, and the voices of ancient middens seemed to say: Come back. There is always more to learn.