McKee Botanical Garden — Vero Beach, Florida

McKee Botanical Garden, located at 350 U.S. Highway 1 in Vero Beach, Florida, is an 18-acre nonprofit institution set within a subtropical hammock on the state's Treasure Coast. The garden's official website documents its founding date as 1932, when it opened as McKee Jungle Gardens — an 80-acre tropical attraction conceived by Arthur McKee and Waldo Sexton and designed by William Lyman Phillips of the Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm. After closing in 1976, the property reopened in 2002 in its current form as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit institution. The garden holds dual historic designations: it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998, and it carries a Florida Heritage Landmark designation, making it among the most formally recognized cultural landscapes in Indian River County.

McKee Botanical Garden traces its origins to a collaboration between two prominent figures in early Vero Beach civic life. Arthur McKee, a local businessman, partnered with Waldo Sexton — a developer and civic personality whose eclectic architectural contributions to Vero Beach also included the Driftwood Inn on the barrier island — to establish what was originally called McKee Jungle Gardens. The garden's official website records the founding year as 1932.

The landscape design was entrusted to William Lyman Phillips, a landscape architect associated with the storied Olmsted Brothers firm — the successor practice to Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., designers of New York's Central Park and Boston's Emerald Necklace. The Trust for Landscape Architecture (TCLF) confirms Phillips as the garden's designer and documents the 1932 opening under the name McKee Jungle Gardens. Phillips's design took advantage of the property's existing subtropical hammock — a dense canopy of live oaks, cabbage palms, and native understory plants — and organized it into a public attraction spanning 80 acres at its peak.

At the time of its founding, McKee Jungle Gardens drew visitors from across the region and eventually became one of Florida's most visited attractions in the mid-twentieth century. Its scale and horticultural ambition reflected both the boosterism of early Vero Beach development and the national fascination with Florida's tropical landscapes during the interwar period. The involvement of an Olmsted-connected designer gave the project a pedigree unusual for a privately funded attraction of that era.

McKee Jungle Gardens closed in 1976, a casualty of competition from large-scale theme parks that reshaped Florida's tourism landscape in the preceding decade. Much of the original 80-acre property was sold for residential development in the years following closure, reducing the preserved footprint considerably. The remnant core — 18 acres of the original subtropical hammock — survived intact and formed the basis for subsequent preservation efforts.

The revival of the garden as a cultural institution was made possible through the intervention of the Indian River Land Trust, which holds a conservation easement protecting the 18-acre property in perpetuity. The garden reopened in 2002 under its current name, McKee Botanical Garden, operating as a nonprofit institution with a dual mission of horticultural education and landscape preservation. The 1998 listing on the National Register of Historic Places — recorded under the garden's original name — preceded the reopening and provided a framework of formal historic recognition that supported the conservation effort. In 2025, the garden marked its centennial with Community Days programming offering reduced-price admission to Indian River County residents, as reported on the garden's official website.

McKee Botanical Garden holds a layered set of formal designations and institutional recognitions that distinguish it within Florida's landscape of cultural and horticultural institutions. In addition to its 1998 National Register of Historic Places listing and its Florida Heritage Landmark designation, the garden's official website documents that it received the Jean and John Greene Prize for Excellence in American Gardening from The Garden Conservancy — and was the first Florida garden to receive that honor.

The garden's waterlily collection carries independent international recognition. The International Waterlily and Water Gardening Society has designated the garden's 51 waterlilies a Collection of Excellence, a status held by only seven collections worldwide, as documented by the garden's official visit page. National Geographic Traveler has named McKee Botanical Garden one of the top 20 places of surprise and sanctuary in North America, according to the same source.

The garden has also been documented as the first Florida garden to host the FLORIGAMI IN THE GARDEN exhibition, per the garden's home page. These designations, taken together, position McKee Botanical Garden as a nationally recognized institution operating within a mid-sized Florida coastal city, rather than a regional amenity of primarily local scope.

McKee Botanical Garden occupies a singular position in Vero Beach's documented cultural identity. The garden's origins are inseparable from the biographical histories of Waldo Sexton and Arthur McKee, two figures whose investments in the city during the 1920s and 1930s shaped its early character. Sexton in particular is documented by Indian River Magazine as a defining civic presence, and the garden stands alongside the Driftwood Inn as one of the tangible surviving expressions of his influence.

The Indian River Land Trust's conservation easement ensures that the 18-acre hammock at the core of the original 80-acre garden cannot be converted to other uses, making the property one of the few irreversibly protected cultural landscapes in Indian River County. The garden's nonprofit structure, its institutional affiliation with national preservation and horticultural bodies, and its centennial programming in 2025 reflect an active institutional life rather than a static historic site. Within Vero Beach — a city whose U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2023 data records a population of 16,785 and a median age of 52.6 — McKee Botanical Garden functions as the city's most extensively documented cultural landmark and the only property in the city named on the National Register of Historic Places for its designed landscape character.