By Coral Gables Gazette staff
TThere is something specifically South Florida about holding a country-themed evening at a botanic garden that once partnered with NASA, whose founders included Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and whose namesake introduced the cherry blossoms to Washington D.C. Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden has always been comfortable with the unexpected. Saturday night’s Boots & Blooms is the latest evidence.
The annual country-themed celebration returns to Fairchild’s 83 acres on Saturday, April 11, from 6 to 9:30 p.m., headlined by the Back Country Boys — a Southwest Florida country-rock band that started in a father’s workshop during the spring of 2020 and has since played more than 400 shows, opened for Jake Owen, Chris Janson, and the Eli Young Band, and appeared at the Barefoot Country Music Festival in New Jersey. Line dancing by Country Heart Dance, pie-eating contests, pumpkin hunts, and lawn games round out the evening. Mini moonshine and bourbon flights, food truck bites, and premium picnic baskets are available as add-ons.
The band and how it began
The Back Country Boys formed the way the best things form — out of circumstance and conviction. In the spring of 2020, when COVID sent students home from Saint John Neumann High School in Southwest Florida, two of them decided to use the time. Michael Joyce, then 17 and coming off a strong junior season at quarterback, and Brayden Reites, then 15 and a drumming prodigy, started playing together in Reites’ father’s workshop. They played everywhere they could that summer — and kept playing through the following school year.
When graduation arrived, Joyce made a decision that most people would consider unreasonable: he turned down offers to play college football and chose music instead. It was the right call. The band — now including Matt Byrne on bass, Vinnie Cilli on lead guitar, and Colton Pointz on piano — has built a following across Florida and nationally through relentless touring and a sound that blends country, rock, and originals in a way that plays equally well in intimate rooms and on festival stages.
Their shared stages include some of the most recognizable names in contemporary country: Jake Owen, Chris Janson, Parmalee, and the Eli Young Band. Their appearances at the Barefoot Country Music Festival and Chicago’s Joe’s on Weed speak to a band that has moved well beyond the regional circuit. They bring that range to Fairchild on Saturday — a high-energy set built for an outdoor evening in a garden setting that rewards exactly the kind of music the Back Country Boys make.
The garden and its character
Fairchild is not a passive backdrop for Saturday’s event. It is an 83-acre institution with a history that is, in its own way, as surprising as a country evening among the palms.
The garden was founded in 1938 by Robert H. Montgomery — an attorney and businessman with a passion for plant collecting — and named for his friend Dr. David Fairchild, one of the most consequential plant explorers in American history. Fairchild traveled the world collecting botanical specimens, introduced more than 200,000 plants to the United States, and was personally responsible for bringing the Japanese cherry trees to Washington D.C. — the ones that now define the capital’s spring. He retired to South Florida, where Montgomery had assembled the 83-acre site along Biscayne Bay that would become the garden.
Among the founding collaborators was Marjory Stoneman Douglas — the environmental writer and activist best known for The Everglades: River of Grass — and landscape architect William Lyman Phillips, a member of the Frederick Law Olmsted partnership who designed the garden’s sweeping vistas, palm-lined lawns, and fourteen lakes. The design is the reason a walk through Fairchild feels like something other than a walk through a park. Every sightline is deliberate. Every transition between spaces is composed.
Today the garden is home to the only tropical rainforest in the continental United States, the Wings of the Tropics butterfly exhibit, one of the largest bamboo collections in the world, and a NASA collaboration that tests edible plants for future space missions. It reaches more than 300,000 schoolchildren annually through programs like the Fairchild Challenge and the Million Orchid Project.
Saturday night it hosts line dancing and pie-eating contests. Both things are true of Fairchild, and both are equally authentic to what the garden has always been — a place that takes plants seriously and its visitors’ enjoyment seriously in equal measure.
The evening
Boots & Blooms is designed to use the garden’s outdoor spaces in the way evening events at Fairchild do best: the grounds as a setting, the scale as an asset, the darkness and the plant life as atmosphere. The Back Country Boys perform live. Country Heart Dance leads line dancing. Premium seating options — including VIP tables and curated picnic baskets for two — offer a more relaxed way to take in the evening if the dance floor is not the destination.
Tickets are $35.95 for general admission. Mini moonshine and bourbon flights are $39 as a separate add-on. Picnic baskets for two are $65. VIP seating ranges from $125 for two to $195 for four. The full schedule of activities will be released closer to the event date.
BOOTS & BLOOMS: A COUNTRY NIGHT IN THE GARDEN
What: Country-themed evening with live music, line dancing, tastings, and lawn activities
When: Saturday, April 11, 6 – 9:30 p.m.
Where: Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, 10901 Old Cutler Road, Coral Gables
Admission: $35.95 general; $65 picnic basket for two; $125 VIP seating for two; $195 VIP seating for four; $39 moonshine and bourbon flights
Tickets: fairchildgarden.org
