At Naples Botanical Garden, the Training Exercise Is a Real Fire — Set on Purpose

The torch is filled with gasoline and diesel fuel, and the job is to light the preserve on fire — carefully, on a line, with dozens of colleagues watching. That was the scene at Naples Botanical Garden, where land managers burned a 17-acre section of the grounds as a training exercise, according to the News-Press. Angel Kelley, a land manager for Conservation Collier, worked the fire line with the torch, setting one shriveled bush alight, then another, along a cut through the preserve. The garden is, in the words of its director of natural resources, Eric Foht, an area that needs fire — native Florida plants, flowers and trees evolved with it — and burning inside an urban boundary, with homes and major roads nearby, is exactly the skill being trained.

The immediate purpose is preparatory: the crews are burning a network of fire breaks and buffer areas for a much larger planned burn that will renew a bigger piece of the garden's preserve. The timing is not accidental. Florida's daily summer rains have likely stopped for the year — the pattern typically fades by October 15, on weather records dating back more than a century — and 2026 has already produced an unusually high number of wildfires across the state. Land that is not burned on purpose, managers say, accumulates the crispy fuel that burns by accident later.

Naples is not doing this alone, and neither is the garden. The Florida Forest Service issues about 88,000 prescribed-burn permits a year, and the state spends about $1.8 million annually working with other agencies to burn undeveloped land. Everglades National Park, much of it in Collier County, burns about 100,000 acres a year out of its 1.5 million; Audubon's Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, just outside Naples, manages its preserve with fire as well. The garden's 17 acres are a classroom version of a statewide practice — and the smoke over Naples this week is the sound of the dry season being prepared for, on purpose.