GARDENS


Discovery Cove is a veritable Garden of Eden, transporting guests to a tropical paradise which meanders through an overgrown jungle and along crystal clear streams.


Eden - the place where we could be happy forever - was a garden lush with fruit and flowers. To this day, brightly colored flowers lure us with a double promise: beauty plus the presence of fruit, berries, squash, or nuts. Te fragrance that helps the flowers attract bumblebees also resonates in our psyche. Smell is our freshest sense (its neurons replace themselves every 30 days), and scents cut straight to the emotional part of our brain, forming robust memories. A garden’s birdsong also has both poetic and prosaic associations, signaling a lush, verdant landscape with plenty of water, sunshine, forage, and shelter, and no harsh extremes of climate to endanger us.


Cultivating veggies and grains allowed us to build stable, agrarian societies. But flowers are magic we coax from the earth. Tey drug us to sleep, intoxicate us, speak our love. Te green of their leaves is the color of balance, centered on the color spectrum, and striking our eye in a way that requires no optical adjustment and is therefore entirely restful. Nature’s bright green calms us more effectively than any other color, a study in the March 2007 Journal of Physiological Anthropology found.


Red, the color of so many flowers, is green’s complement, directly opposite on the color wheel. Red has the longest wavelength on the spectrum. It excites the eye and advances visually, seeming nearer than it is, grabbing us by the lapels with its urgency.


Te interplay between the restful green and the exciting red gives our brain just the right stimulus, so we are soothed but not bored. From the first, gardens have shaped our aesthetic sensibility.


Te concept for Discovery Cove was simple: Take people away to a tropical paradise.


“It’s making people feel, the minute they step inside the resort, like they’re not in Orlando anymore,” says Landscape Architect Dan O’Neill.


Te progression starts with a frisson of excited anticipation as you walk into a large, thatched building with wicker furniture and a relaxed resort feel. As soon as you come out the other side, “your view is framed across lagoon pools and sandy beaches. Te landscape sets multiple backdrops so you have this sense that it goes on and on.” O’Neill’s team used bent palms that look like they’re leaning close to hear you whisper; giant ficus trees; short bromeliads bursting with red flowers; potted plants that pop with bright color and bring scale to the guest path. “Te larger-leafed plants make it feel lush, already overgrown the day the park opened.” Te garden is eternally interesting.


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