Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden is an botanic garden with extensive collections of rare tropical plants including palms, cycads, flowering trees, and vines. It is located in the city of Coral Gables, Miami-Dade County, just south of Miami, surrounded at the north and west by Matheson Hammock Park. Fairchild opened to the public in 1938. Fairchild is a museum, laboratory, learning center, and conservation research facility whose main role is preserving biodiversity. It has 45,000 members and more than 1,200 volunteers. In 2012, Fairchild became the home of the American Orchid Society. History The garden was established in 1936 by Robert H. Montgomery (1872–1953), an accountant, attorney, and businessman with a passion for plant-collecting. Montgomery pursued the creation of a botanical garden in Miami. He purchased the 83-acre site along Biscayne Bay and later deeded it in large part to Miami-Dade County. Montgomery named the garden after his friend, renowned plant explorer David Fairchild (1869–1954). Fairchild's travels brought more than 75,000 plants to the United States, including pima cotton, durham wheat, mangos, alfalfa, nectarines, dates, horseradish, bamboos, and flowering cherry trees. David Fairchild had retired to Miami in 1935 after a long career at the USDA establishing the Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction Bureau. Many plants still growing in the Garden were collected and planted by him, including a giant African baobab tree. The garden was designed by landscape architect William Lyman Phillips, member of the Frederick Law Olmsted partnership, and a leading landscape designer in South Florida during the 1930s. He obtained his landscape architecture degree from Harvard in 1910. Lyman Phillips came to Florida in 1924 and by 1933 he was working with the Dade County Park Department and drawing plans for Greynolds Park and Matheson Hammock Park. In 1938 Phillips began design for Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Phillip's top three principles when designing the Fairchild garden were: variety, consistency, and contrast. The primary buildings and landscape features, including the Montgomery Palmetum, Bailey Palm Glade, Allee and Overlook, Vine Pergola, Amphitheatre, Gate House, Montgomery Library and Museum, 14 lakes, stone terracing walls, irrigation systems, Moos Sunken Garden, and Nell Montgomery Garden House auditorium were built in the first 15 years. Later buildings included the Davis House (1953), Hawkes Laboratory (1960), Robbins Plant Science Building (1967), Rare Plant House (1968), Corbin Education Building (1972), Jean duPont Shehan Visitor Center (2002), and various additions over the years. In 2010 there was