Jennifer Rominiecki left the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Opera and 15 years at the New York Botanical Garden to take the top job at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in 2015, and she still remembers being surprised that Sarasota's West Coast was unfamiliar territory even after a career built entirely on the East Coast. What drew her, she says, was the sense that Selby was "a diamond in the rough" -- an internationally known collection without the finished, fully built-out infrastructure of the institutions she'd left behind.
The Leaf, Not a Parking Garage
By the end of 2023, Selby expects to complete phase one of a master plan 50 years in the making -- the length of time it took the gardens to acquire all the once-separately-owned parcels around Marie Selby's original bequest of five acres. The centerpiece is what Rominiecki insists on calling the LEAF, or Living Energy Access Facility: a structure that houses parking, a new Garden to Plate restaurant, a gift shop, and a rooftop solar array covering 50,000 square feet that will generate nearly a megawatt of power. Once finished, Selby will be, by her account, the first net-positive botanical garden complex in the world, and the first net-positive restaurant will sit inside it. The whole building is being wrapped in vertical gardens and vines to blend into the surrounding Harbor Acres-area neighborhood, after some residents initially pushed back on a larger structure so close to homes.
The expansion nearly doubles the gardens' footprint and solves a problem Rominiecki calls painful to watch as CEO: turning away hundreds of cars on peak days because there was nowhere to park. It also permanently protects the land -- now codified as a single botanical-garden parcel -- from ever being sold off for development, something few visitors realize was even possible under the old private ownership structure.
A Living Museum, Not a Static One
Rominiecki describes reshaping Selby's operating model around a "Living Museum" concept, with rotating art and horticulture exhibits meant to earn repeat visits rather than a single trip. Past shows have paired the gardens with Tiffany glass and Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith; an upcoming exhibition pairs Yayoi Kusama with Georgia O'Keeffe, tracing a real correspondence between the two artists. The gardens' holiday light show, Lights in Bloom, was ranked the sixth-best in the country by USA Today, with more than two million lights across the downtown campus, and Selby has separately run the historic 30-acre Spanish Point campus since adopting it during the pandemic in 2020.
On the roundabout question, Rominiecki calls it a split decision: she likes the small ones, but the larger multi-lane roundabouts make her carsick.
What you'll take away
- Selby Gardens' phase-one expansion is set to make it the first net-positive botanical garden complex in the world, powered by a nearly 1-megawatt rooftop solar array
- The Living Energy Access Facility, or LEAF, houses parking, a restaurant and a gift shop rather than serving as a standalone parking garage
- It took Selby Gardens roughly 50 years to acquire all the contiguous land needed to finally implement its master plan
- The gardens' research team has discovered or described more than 2,000 species over 50 years and is now a Smithsonian affiliate
- Selby has operated the historic 30-acre Spanish Point campus since adopting it during the 2020 pandemic
“We will become the first net-positive botanical garden complex in the world.”
“We never want someone to say, oh, I've been to Selby Gardens, it's beautiful, as if you don't have a reason to come back.”
Places mentioned: Selby Gardens, Harbor Acres, Spanish Point, Longboat Key