"A South Florida Park Gets a Raymond Jungles Makeover: The redesign of a Palm Beach park will spread the word on native plants," Landscape Architecture Magazine, November 6, 2024.
Phipps Ocean Park is an 18-acre stretch of Palm Beach, in South Florida, donated to the public in 1948 by the Phipps family, heirs of Carnegie Steel partner Henry Phipps. Concerned by redevelopment on the island, the Phipps family was worried that public access to the beach was being lost. Today, Phipps Ocean Park is owned by Palm Beach County, but it is hidden from the street behind north and south parking lots on either side of a fire station. A row of imported palm trees and a handful of indigenous sable palms are most of what remains of the original dune.
When the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach began contemplating improvements to the grounds of the Little Red Schoolhouse, an 1886 one-room school relocated to the park in 1960, where it runs a living history program, its ambitions rapidly grew to include the surrounding landscape. “If we’re going to preserve our heritage, we need to be cognizant of the environmental issues at play,” says Amanda Skier, the foundation’s president and CEO.
Skier’s team hired the Miami-based landscape architect Raymond Jungles, FASLA, winner of the 2024 ASLA Design Medal, to craft a vision for a restored coastal ecosystem that could serve the foundation’s education and advocacy missions. Jungles brings an obvious passion for repopulating species often decimated by commercial developments. “I have a little bit of a subversive attitude,” Jungles says. “I want to bring the plants back that were there, and let those seeds be available to the squirrels and to the birds so that they can spread from where I’ve done my little landscape.”
Working with the ecological restoration specialist George Gann of the Institute for Regional Conservation, Jungles incorporated a matrix of local dune plants that will thrive together and uncover vistas. A topography of natural landforms recalls the original dunes of the Atlantic barrier island, and parking areas will include wide medians with shade trees. To highlight the importance of native dune plants and respond to their unavailability in commercial nurseries, the team is establishing the Coastal Restoration Center nursery within the park that will be run as an independent nonprofit in partnership with the Institute for Regional Conservation.
The center will grow local species and give them away for free. In effect, the park will be an evangelical wilderness, spreading the biodiversity gospel throughout the state. “We’ll know the project has been a success when every beach dune in Palm Beach has been restored,” Skier says.
