Cordgrasses and jointgrasses, sea purslane, salt wort, and sand spur, and other plants of tidal environments may never compete commercially with dryland ornamental grasses, but a Dune garden at the Florida Aquarium begins the process of familiarizing visitors with the variety of vegetation native to penninsular Florida which is being scientifically replanted at such preserves as Leffis Key.

Education of visitors to the Florida Aquarium begins before the turnstile, in the ecological landscape along the parking lots and parkways, whose swales and "strands" were designed by Ekistics Design Studio to manage stormwater runoff with naturalized vegetation. In lieu of conveying and detaining water for percolation in concrete pipes, wetland vegetation grouped according to specific soil and moisture requirements (and assisted in establishment by a low volume irrigation) converts drainage and detention areas into functioning natural systems. Southwest Florida Water Management District was impressed with the demonstration and educational opportunities of the concepts extolled in a grant request and subsequently awarded $500,000 for the improvements, exhibits, and signage and is monitoring the water quality of the excess stormwater which cascades from the strand system into a detention pond before discharge into a shipping channel.

In contrast to these naturally evolving areas, the locations and themes of explicitly educational landscape areas are ordered and structured. The queing plaza demonstration garden was designed to showcase native vegetation -- from the beach dune to the bayhead -- in the context of a pleasant human environment. Generous seating areas, bicycle parking, a water fountain and restroom facilities within a landscape whose ecological design divides the areas into 50% shaded and green surfaces and 50% sunny open areas with respect to the shadow of the massive building and the low angle of the afternoon sun.

In addition to a second grant for educational signage from the Tampa Bay National Estuary Program, the landscape has has won two awards for native planting: the Florida Native Plant Society's Design with Natives Grand Award and a community design award for natural environment from the Hillsborough County City-County Planning Commission. Notwithstanding, Ekistics' Tom Levin, ASLA, AICP, was suddenly cognizant of its success as an attractant garden one night when that quality was clearly measurable in "the song of the frogs and crickets" that had long been absent from the site of the former Coca-Cola bottling plant.

The broad-reaching success of educational displays familiarizing people with such native vegetation is visible in the number of volunteers who rally to restore Florida's environment, including Leffis Key, a spoil island which Manatee County aims to restore to pre-1950's conditions with a grant from the Sarasota Bay National Estuary Program (SBNEP). Calling the Leffis Key Habitat Restoration a "landmark project" (it is one of 21 projects funded by the EPA through its estuary protection programs -- one of twelve at the time of funding), the director of SBNEP, Mark Alderson enthusiastically described the progression of "intertidal pools and sand dunes along the road that abutts the beach [as] 'dramatic' in and of themselves," made all the more spectacular by the view of the "Bahama-colored sea" that can be viewed from a land formation resembling an "Indian midden" atop the key.

Charged with redesigning the tidal environment at Leffis Key, Jack Gorzeman, Landscape Architect in Manatee County's Environmental Management Department, and Alan Burdett, an expert in coastal vegetation with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, described the scientific precision of the planting succession from the shoreline. Devised relative to the designated sea level planes of tidal, intertidal, and drier zones, planting of over 20,000 marsh grasses -- smooth cordgrass, saltwater cordgrass, and salt jointgrass -- on the banks of the tidal ponds was accomplished entirely by volunteer labor, who thereby helped create a variety of habitats for fish, especially juvenile fish (necessarily a major object of restoration). Natural mangrove recruitment has rapidly occurred due to the mature mangroves bordering the created wetlands, though the upland required replanting of non-native species with native dune and coastal ridge plants, such as sea oats, beach elder, dune sunflower, southern red cedar, green buttonwood, sea grape, gumbo-limbo, hercules club, jamaica dogwood, and strangler fig.

A baywalk, which provides access to all comers, leads to an upland knoll constructed from excavated earth 26 feet high: as the highest point in coastal Manatee County, it affords a 360-degree view of Sarasota Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.