This is where Van Horn prepares to extract venom from the serpents’ fangs to send to university laboratories and pharmaceutical companies. But the biggest attractions are the twice-daily venom shows on the other side of the building. Outside in the courtyard is a pond filled with turtles, a cage of iguanas and a family of American alligators, including a 14-foot father alligator and a 10-foot mama alligator protective of her recent hatchlings. Inside, past a rustic-looking gift shop offering weathered books on reptiles and iguanas, cottonmouth fangs for $2, snake toys and T-shirts and mounted snakeskin, they can turn right and walk into a dimly lit reptile section.īehind the glass, coiled like ropes or draped around branches, dozens of the center’s hundreds of serpents are on display: red tail boa constrictors black mambas a southern copperhead covered in diamond patterns of brown, tan and orange the poisonous eastern coral snake with its black, yellow and red stripes and enormous reticulated pythons with bodies as thick as a grown man’s thigh. They might zoom by without noticing his nondescript low-slung building on the side of the highway across from a horse ranch -– if not for the 12-foot tall concrete cobra rearing its head and peering out at motorists ahead of a sign that reads Reptile World Serpentarium. 192 a little more than 30 miles southeast of both Orlando and Disney World in Central Florida. “As soon as I saw that, in my mind I said that’s what I was going to do,” he says.ĭecades later, visitors can find Van Horn in St. At the young age of 6, after meeting his hero, Bill Haast at the Miami Serpentarium, a unique Florida attraction, he grew certain he could make a career out of it. But ever since he was a little boy and started catching garter and water snakes in the swampy Everglades surrounding Miami, he knew there wasn’t anything else he would rather do. View contest information and rules, download an application, or view the previous winners online.George Van Horn isn’t sure why he loves them so much. Start snapping photos for this year's Photography in the Gardens Contest! Photos will be judged in both Landscapes and Hardscapes, in both youth and adult age groups. The event is free and open to the public. The Art Fair hosts a variety of artists from around the state, as well as musicians and food vendors. The Art Fair in the Gardens takes place throughout the Gardens in mid-July. To view the current schedule, visit the MCBS website. All concerts are free the Munsinger Clemens Botanical Society offers $2 root beer floats for guests to enjoy during the concert. near the Gazebo in Munsinger Gardens on the banks of the Mississippi River. To learn more about this group, visit their website or contact them by email.Ĭoncerts are held during the summer on alternating Sundays, beginning mid-June, at 3:00 p.m. It provides valuable services for its members and will provide financial support to the Munsinger and Clemens Gardens. The Munsinger Clemens Botanical Society was formed to serve garden lovers and lovers of these Gardens.
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