Step Inside a New Floral Wonderland at a Florida Botanical Garden

At the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida, fifteen acres explode with life. Giant Amazonian lilies float alongside native spatterdocks and watershields, and technicolor bromeliads burst into spikes of cheery reds and oranges. But as a special winter treat, the full life cycle of flowers—seeding, budding, and dried—are taking center stage inside the museum’s halls with a special artist collaboration, The Orchid Show 2025: Rebecca Louise Law.

Law, a British visual artist, installed the immersive exhibit in the Richard and Ellen Sandor Museum of Botany and the Arts at Selby, and it runs until January 11, 2026. Strands of thousands of preserved flowers hang from the ceiling, creating a curtain of diverse color and texture around archway entries and staircases and along the walls.

Guests can walk through the gigantic columns of color, made up of individual dried fronds, petals, and seeds harvested either in Law’s own garden in Snowdonia, a mountainous environment in Northern Wales, or from Florida growers. Purple perennial sea lavender drip beside bending stems and the pale pink faces of daisies, and fluffy marigolds seem to cast a warm, golden light. The spiky, flat seed pods of honey locust trees and dried globes of allium heads become moving sculptures as they dangle in the air. These small botanics—some of which you might more naturally see on the ground, like the gaping, hard mouths of buddha coconut trees—become magical dangling confetti, fit for the pages of a storybook. But the whimsy of the installation is rooted in Law’s love for natural science and the earth.

The forty-five-year-old artist grew up in the Welsh countryside alongside a “wild garden full of shrubs, grass, a tiny orchard, a large pine tree, and a large sycamore tree,” she says. “Studying nature was at the heart of my art. Flowers became my muse.” At Newcastle University’s School of Arts and Cultures in England, she studied painting and printmaking, but as a young student, she found two-dimensional media limiting. She turned to installation instead, designing her first immersive floral exhibit—a project in which visitors walked under a blanket of drying flowers—in 2003. “The space became my canvas,” she says. “The flowers became my paint.”

After meeting Selby’s exhibition director, Dr. David Berry, at her 2022 show at Jacksonville’s Cummer Museum, the artist had been dreaming up how to activate the space at the Sarasota museum. Dried flowers are difficult to work with—it’s tough to transport the fragile plant material through the lengthy customs process, and they can sometimes draw nesting pests. But Law says the slow and deliberate pace of her work, both as an artist and gardener, “has endowed lessons in climate, soil health, insects, and time.” Winter is aptly her favorite season: “Living in Wales, we have a long winter. I love the natural pause and the chance to catch up with the garden.”

Law’s dry specimens transform the gallery space, but in the Tropical and Display Conservatories, Selby’s horticultural team designed installations around the namesake star of the Orchid Show. In soft pea green–colored display cases, the cream and burgundy blooms of oncidium Sharry Baby orchids float above beds of moss, where water pours from a shelf like a waterfall; dendrobium and phalaenopsis orchids cling to the trunks of trees, drawing the eye upward. And, taking note from the suspension of Law’s flowers, the horticultural team tapped into the museum’s collection of spirit-preserved orchids—the second largest holding in the world—and hung glass jars of them between fans of tropical palms and ferns.

Selby has long focused on its orchid collection, a legacy of its founders, Carlyle Luer and Cal Dodson. “Both scientists brought their personal collections of living but especially preserved materials to form the core of our collections, including spirit and herbarium specimens,” executive director Jennifer Rominiecki says. Today, researchers and students can study the herbarium collection, and institutions can even borrow specimens.

The theme of survival runs through the entire show. “The living collection has plants that may be the last known [of their kind],” Law says, noting the near-extinct Florida species Sacoila lanceolata (Leafless beaked orchid) and Epidendrum floridense (Florida star orchid). According to Rominiecki, only 250 individual star orchids remain in nature, and the museum maintains its own seed bank for research and propagation for that and other native declining species, including Harrisia aborigenum. “Survival felt like the right word for the work that Marie Selby Gardens does—and what the flower does,” Law says. “We are all surviving, and valuing the earth and each other is vital.”

The show is on display now and has an extended run until January 11, 2026.