You’ll have to go see what I mean

Instead of ranting as I sometimes do on this soapbox, let me rave.

Raving can be a lot fun and it’s usually bloodless, unlike ranting, although I think it’s completely misunderstood, at least as I’m about to demonstrate it.

Most people think that raving requires only a few tools: pom-poms, big bass drums, applause. Maybe an expensive marketing firm or two, or a squad of cheerleaders.

Wild enthusiasm is commonplace among ravers, and rationality is not, I’m sorry to say.

But in my case, I want to be a graver raver, a more serious delirious, if I can.

So let me rave quietly for a moment about the Naples Botanical Garden, the subject of this week’s lead story.

I wrote the story. Normally, reporters should not comment with opinions on the news they write — not that we don’t have opinions, me in particular. But when writing news, even feature news like this, we should just shut up about our opinions.

In this case, though, nothing is normal because nothing about the Naples Botanical Garden is normal.

It used to be that if you went there, like the Oakland of Gertrude Stein, there was no there there. Instead, there was a nice little spot with nice little visitors and some nice little trellises and nice little flowers surrounding a nice little lawn behind a nice little wall where some nice little people would have nice little weddings, from time to time.

Perhaps it wasn’t quite that nice, but you get the idea.

Then something strange occurred. Somebody who was not a nice little visitor came along one day when none of us were really looking. That somebody pulled out a wad of cash, counted off $36 million right on the spot, hired the best landscape architects, engineers, garden managers and ecologists or botanists, brought in the best job supervisors, the best contractors and building crews, and the most devoted band of volunteers, and got to work.

About 15 minutes later, they were ready to open the new Naples Botanical Garden, which will happen Nov. 14.

So I went out there and looked at it last week with the director, Brian Holley, expecting a mere garden confection, an amusing morning interlude. Instead, I came back a raver with a different world view.

First of all, this garden — all five of the gardens here, each of them several acres or more — is so beautiful that you want to just say, What deadline? What job? What clock? What worries?

And many future visitors will, God bless them.

But I set my manly jaw and followed the road less traveled. I tore myself away from the place after about three hours so I could come back and rave.

I’d been startled by the sophistication and design, by the level of botanical calculation and knowledge, by the sheer size of the place, and by the obvious sense that many people in Naples don’t have a clue what’s just happened right under their noses.

That reaction was to be expected, as I thought about it.

It’s as if New York City had been built without a park, and suddenly one day somebody just said, “Here you go, I’m giving you Central Park. Go take some pleasure.”

Although I’m raving, I don’t think that analogy is far fetched. Naples has other parks and gardens, of course, but there is nothing in the region or even the state to compare to this botanical garden, which is a pure gift to the people. Nobody who did it had to do it, but they did.

Fairchild Botanic Gardens in the Miami area is marvelous, too — and at 83 acres and 71 years of age, it has both size and tradition (it was designed by the Olmsted Group, whose founder, Frederick Law Olmsted, designed Central Park in New York some 80 years earlier, in 1859).

But Naples has the muscular exuberance and imaginative reach of youth — or of infancy, to be more accurate. And it’s a beautiful baby. And it had not one designer but five. And so on.

Even that is not what struck me the most, however. What really surprises me is the story of the people who did this.

They come from a hundred backgrounds and they tell a thousand tales. The daughter of Barron Collier works hand in hand with a one-time Rocky Mountain homesteader and a rich philanthropist who grew up on a Michigan farm. His son and daughter-in-law give $12 million and work with a woman who was married to a man who ran Scott’s Miracle-Gro Company and hated gardening, but devoted his final years to the Botanical Garden, and she and a friend throw the finest Hat Day between here and the Royal Ascot, and all of them rely on the young man from the Indiana farm, now a restoration ecologist who knows more about native species than any of them, or the retired professor of botany who has collected 30,000 plant specimens for the Herbarium, or the volunteers who walk out into the garden and themselves grow either slack-jawed with surprise, or hyper-verbal with excitement.

Let me name a few I met: Nancy Williams, Wally and Liz Martel, Joyce Fletcher, Steve Monaghan, and Linda Fichter.

Mrs. Fichter, particularly impressive as a raver, wandered back from the birding tower and tossed out a spontaneous rave that I wrote down when she came across me and Mr. Holley.

“I feel like I’m in wonderland. It moves me to tears. It fills your heart with the beauty of place. It’s just going to blow people’s minds away. I had no idea it was on this scale. And the birding tower... I wish you could see it through my eyes.”

When she paused, Mr. Holley turned to me and said, “It’s really nice when this stuff just comes out unsolicited and you don’t even have to pay for it.”

Now there’s a raver manager doubling as a garden manager, too — and the best in the business at both, I’d say.

You’ll have to go see what I mean. 