Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden

Fairchild gets its name from one of the most famous plant explorers in history, David Fairchild (1869-1954). Dr. Fairchild was known for traveling the world in search of useful plants, but he was also an educator and a renowned scientist. At the age of 22, he created the Section of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction of the United States Department of Agriculture, and for the next 37 years, he traveled the world in search of plants of potential use to the American people. Fairchild visited every continent in the world (except Antarctica) and brought back hundreds of important plants, including mangos, alfalfa, nectarines, dates, cotton, soybeans, bamboos and the flowering cherry trees that grace Washington D.C.

Robert H. Montgomery was an accountant, attorney and successful businessman with a passion for plant collecting. With the guidance of Dr. Fairchild, he pursued the dream of creating a botanical garden in Miami, the one place in the continental United States, where tropical plants could grow outdoors year-round. Opened to the public in 1938, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden was established on an 83-acre site south of Miami purchased by Col. Montgomery and later deeded in large part to Miami-Dade County. Renowned landscape architect William Lyman Phillips, a member of the Frederik Law Olmsted partnership and a leading landscape designer during the 1930s, designed the Garden.