New pedestrian walkway will link Bayshore District with Sugden Regional Park
For three days in mid-January, Naples Botanical Garden staff took their plants and planting operations to a 17-acre parcel just north of our Bayshore Drive campus to help turn a longtime neighborhood vision into reality.
The property is owned by the Bayshore Gateway Triangle Community Redevelopment Agency, which has long aspired to create a pedestrian walkway linking the fast-growing Bayshore District to Sugden Regional Park. The Garden has been setting aside plant material for years, ultimately providing about a thousand trees, shrubs, and groundcovers.
Our involvement is fitting: That property, located between Lunar Street and Jeepers Drive, was the Garden’s original site. Our founders in the late 1990s had begun to plant (there’s a remnant row of palms along Bayshore Drive) but halted development once the late business executive and philanthropist Harvey Kapnick Jr. offered a bigger vision and a financial gift to buy the 170 acres where the Garden sits today…