Drive down Flamingo Road in early October and you will pass two gates within a few miles of each other, both flying the same first name. One leads into a nonprofit wildlife sanctuary that started as an orange grove in 1927. The other leads into a ten-acre commercial garden center that turns into a hay-bale-and-pumpkin market every fall. Say "Flamingo" to a neighbor and you have a fifty-fifty shot at being misunderstood, because Davie is quietly running two separate fall festivals under a name that sounds like one.
That mix-up matters more than it sounds like it should. If you only know the sanctuary, you get one themed Saturday. If you only know the nursery, you get a pumpkin patch and call it a season. Know both, and Davie's fall calendar stretches into something closer to six straight weekends of programming that never repeats a venue or a theme.
A Sanctuary and a Garden Center, Sharing a Road and Little Else
Flamingo Gardens, at 3750 South Flamingo Road, is one of the oldest botanical gardens in South Florida, established in 1927. It is also an Everglades Wildlife Sanctuary that houses permanently injured and non-releasable animals, including Florida panthers, alligators, otters, and bald eagles, across 60 acres. It is a nonprofit. The admission you pay goes toward the animals living there, not toward keeping the lights on for a seasonal pop-up.
Flamingo Road Nursery is a different kind of business entirely: a working garden center that spends six weeks every fall turning its ten acres into what it calls a fall paradise, complete with cornstalks, hay bales, mums, and a pumpkin patch. It is not affiliated with the Gardens. It sells plants the rest of the year and leans into the seasonal transformation as a draw, the way garden centers across the country do, except this one does it in South Florida, where the humidity makes the New England staging feel like a small act of defiance.
Both businesses are real, both are on the same corridor, and both have built their October around a version of the same word: harvest.
The Sanctuary's Four-Weekend Run
Flamingo Gardens organizes its fall programming as Harvest Festival Weekends, and the 2026 lineup is built around four distinct themes, each with its own dress code and entertainment:
| Weekend | Theme | What's Different |
|---|---|---|
| October 3 & 4 | Cowboys & Cowgirls | South Florida Cloggers perform; framed as a celebration of Davie's history |
| October 10 & 11 | Pirates | Live interactive pirate shows |
| October 17 & 18 | Dia de los Muertos | Costumes and face painting |
| October 24 & 25 | Halloween Party | Costume-focused, no specific narrative theme |
The Cowboys & Cowgirls weekend is the one worth pausing on. This is a wildlife sanctuary whose entire identity runs through the Everglades: alligators, panthers, native plant collections, a mission built around conservation. And yet when it wants to open its biggest fall weekend, it does not reach for anything in its own wheelhouse. It reaches for Davie's rodeo identity instead, hires a clogging troupe, and calls it a history celebration. That is a small but telling signal about which story this town tells about itself when it wants a crowd. The cowtown identity that shows up at Bergeron Rodeo Grounds is strong enough to pull a botanical garden three miles away into its orbit for a weekend.
The Nursery's Longer, Quieter Run
While the Gardens work in four discrete weekends, Flamingo Road Nursery runs a longer, looser six-week festival that typically stretches from late September through the first week of November. Instead of a costume theme each weekend, the nursery's fall lineup rotates through food-focused weeks: Pepper Palooza, Tomato Fest, and a Tropical Fruit Celebration among them. The centerpiece is an antique tractor pulling hayrides out to a spot the nursery calls the Davie Moonshine and Fish Camp, alongside the pumpkin patch and a backdrop area called Grandma's Garden built for family photos.
Because the nursery's run starts earlier and ends later than the Gardens' four weekends, the two calendars do not really compete. The nursery opens the season before the Gardens' first themed weekend and stays open after the Gardens' last one closes. A family that treats these as one undifferentiated fall festival is leaving weeks of the actual calendar untouched.
Why the Overlap Is the Actual Story
Line the two calendars up and Davie's fall stops looking like a single event and starts looking like a stretch. Someone paying attention to both venues could realistically plan a run that looks something like this:
- Late September into early October: nursery visits for the early theme weeks, ahead of any costume pressure
- October 3 and 4: Cowboys & Cowgirls at the Gardens, with the Cloggers
- October 10 and 11: Pirates at the Gardens
- October 17 and 18: Dia de los Muertos at the Gardens, nursery still running Tomato Fest or Tropical Fruit week in parallel
- October 24 and 25: Halloween Party at the Gardens
- Into the first week of November: nursery's festival closes out the run after the Gardens have already wrapped
That is not a coincidence of scheduling so much as it is two businesses independently deciding that Davie residents want more fall than a single weekend can hold, and neither one waiting for the other to move first.
Before You Go
A few practical notes worth knowing before you build a weekend around either calendar. Flamingo Gardens opens daily at 9:30 a.m., with last entry at 4:00 p.m. and full closing at 5:00 p.m., so a themed weekend is not an evening plan unless you check for extended hours around a specific event. Specialty weekend programming at both venues is listed as subject to change, which is standard for outdoor South Florida events running through the tail end of hurricane season, so it is worth confirming the week of rather than relying on a calendar you bookmarked in August. Flamingo Gardens members and children two and under are admitted free to the general grounds, though specific festival-weekend pricing should be confirmed directly with the Gardens before you plan around it.
None of this requires choosing sides between a nonprofit sanctuary and a family-run nursery. It requires knowing that Davie is running both, on the same road, in the same six weeks, and that treating them as one event is the reason so many residents end up doing exactly one fall thing a year in a town that has quietly built enough programming for six.
That is the kind of detail that tends to separate someone who has lived in Davie for years from someone who just moved here. The Sklar Team spends as much time paying attention to what is happening on Flamingo Road as we do to what is happening in a listing, because the two are more connected than people expect. If you are weighing a move in Davie or Weston and want to talk about what a neighborhood actually feels like day to day, not just what the median price says, request your free home valuation and let's talk about it as neighbors first.