Some of the most influential moments in Kelly Joy Ladd’s life happened in high school, when she worked as a performer at Disney World. She recalls how enthralled she was backstage with the intricacies and designs of the costumes. “It really helped me create and build my imagination,” she says. “I saw these world-class designs […]

If you want to understand Florida, connect with its sometimes-menacing beauty, encounter the place unmediated by walls, glass and air-conditioning, here’s how you do it: Go outside. Leave the comfortable subdivisions—Osprey Pointe, Oak Arbor, Sweetwater Springs—named for whatever the developer destroyed in order to build them. Get away from the places where nature is highly […]

Dependence on foreign resources seems like a modern-day problem. But in the 1920s, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were obsessed with it. Among their worries was rubber, produced only in foreign countries. In 1927, they decided to build a laboratory to determine whether rubber plants could grow in American soil. Searching for a semitropical setting, […]