Bob and Jan Emfield, who lived in Minnesota, decided to buy a vacation home at Bonita Beach in the 1970s after exploring Florida for a long time. Thus was born the Tommy Bahama concept: The couple invented a laid-back character who would be heading to the beach with a lawn chair in one hand and a martini in the other as they loaded their suitcases in the car to drive to the airport for the trip back north. Eventually the Emfields and friends gave the imaginary character an entire Jimmy Buffett-cum-Walter Mitty lifestyle, including a convertible VW bug with the top always down to hold fishing rods. One day they started to wonder what kind of clothes he would wear—a speculation that became the basis of the tropical Tommy Bahama look that Emfield and two partners pioneered at the first Tommy Bahama store in Naples 11 years ago. It’s since morphed into a hugely successful chain of 54 clothing stores and restaurants in the United States, Canada and Saudi Arabia.

After Jan was diagnosed with cancer in 1990, she underwent a regimen typical in those days: chemotherapy, radiation, lumpectomy and mastectomy. Jan came up with the idea for the Garden of Hope & Courage at the couple’s English garden on Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota, where she regularly met with a dozen fellow cancer patients. They called it their garden of courage, and she jotted down notes and ideas on a legal pad for the garden she began to envision—not only what it might look like, but how it might be used. “She felt that the garden should be for everybody, not just the people on the lake side of town,” Emfield said.

Jan’s cancer had been in remission for nearly three years when doctors determined that it had metastasized to her bones. She became sicker and frailer, and began spending more time in the hospital and less time at home. Once on a trip back from the hospital, she broke her hip just by getting out of the car. “The disease had progressed to where she was in pretty bad shape, but not if you asked her,” Emfield said. “She was a fighter and she was still certain that we were going to beat this thing.”

Richard D’Amico had first met Emfield when he worked for him at a store Emfield owned in Ohio. D’Amico and his wife, Bunny, had become close friends with the Emfields over the years. As Jan’s condition worsened, D’Amico would bring dinner over to her from his restaurants in Minneapolis; once he asked her what else he could do for her. “Well, since you’re asking me, here’s what you can do for me. You can see that the Garden of Hope & Courage becomes a reality,” she said.

The garden turned into a labor of love as D’Amico and friends worked for more than a decade to turn it from a wish into reality. Originally, the plan was to put the garden in Minneapolis. But engineering and other hurdles killed three proposed sites, even though the city and a local hospital were receptive to the idea of a healing garden. After striking out three times in Minnesota, D’Amico, who’d just bought a villa in Old Naples, was driving to Wynn’s Market one day several years ago. He overshot the store by a block, and happened to notice “a kind of overrun garden with a lake” next to the hospital. It was a Eureka moment. He called NCH’s CEO, Ed Morton, and the two men eventually made a deal. The Garden of Hope & Courage Foundation, a nonprofit, would work under a licensing agreement to transform the two-and-a-half acre site into a healing garden. It would benefit patients trying to recover from a variety of maladies, including cancer, and hospital employees looking for a serene place to take a break. It would improve the looks of the hospital’s grounds. And it would save the hospital some money, because the foundation would undertake maintenance and upkeep expenses for the garden.

Some healing gardens exist in the United States, although they’re far from common. The foundation looked at plans from several local architectural landscape companies, and finally selected Smallwood Design Group of Naples, based on the proposal it submitted and its experience with the many large private and public projects it had done in Collier. Many members of the team had lost parents or siblings to cancer, including JoAnn Smallwood, whose mother had died of lung cancer. Smallwood’s mother had been given two months to live, but actually survived 10 years, an outcome that Smallwood attributed in part to a healing garden doctors recommended her mother visit in Gainesville.

“Throughout history gardens have been used to aid healing,” she said. “If you go way back in history to the Japanese Zen garden, monastic cloister gardens, they used a philosophy that basically we’re using today, combining architectural elements—history, sculpture, planting—with the natural topography. In Zen gardens, they used elements of architecture combined with water, with plantings, often with stone and art as sculpture. Those are the basic elements that are not only akin to garden design but particular to healing elements.”

Some studies have suggested that healing gardens may decrease recuperation time for patients, and reduce the amount of medications they must take, Smallwood said, perhaps because beautiful, natural settings have a tendency to make people relax. “People inside a four-wall sterile environment have a lot of things to overcome,” she said. “There’s true research on stress recovery that says positive feelings reduce negative emotions, that a healing garden holds their interest and thus reduces the stressful impact of those four walls. They’ve found that by doing that, it actually reduces time in the hospital.”

To design the garden, Smallwood rounded up a group of pros, including Dr. Joanne Westphal, a professor of landscape architecture in Michigan who’s also an M.D. and an expert on healing gardens. Westphal spent several days in Naples walking the site with hospital and garden people, including Keith Whipple, Smallwood’s senior project landscape architect. After charettes, discussions with members of the garden foundation’s board, hospital administrators, engineers, artists and others, and numerous revisions, Whipple came up with a plan that uses the one-acre lake as a centerpiece of the garden. A walkway encircles the lake, meandering through a number of mini-gardens and a variety of private and public spaces. Tens of thousands of plants will be put in, from bromeliads to ground orchids to water lilies to palm trees. The lake’s drainage will be improved in an attempt to prevent the flooding that has plagued the neighborhood during downpours.

At the ceremonial entrance, to the east of the hospital’s main building, at Eighth Street North, visitors will be greeted by three big beautiful bronze sculptures by Kathy Spalding, who lives in Naples. Spalding is a quiet, intense, chain-smoking woman who’s a graduate of the Pratt Institute. She’s done large sculptures for many grand manors in Naples and elsewhere, and also for some large commercial projects - notably, a 22,000-pound, 40-foot flying-fish fountain for the Atlantis Resort in Nassau in the Bahamas, a project of Sol Kerzner, the South African billionaire (he’s recently asked Spalding to help out with a new resort he’s cooking up in Dubai).

She’s spent three years working on designs for the garden; the board rejected 50 proposals, she said - hands coming out of the ground; flamingos taking off into the lake; Japanese origami turning into cranes - before she got approval for the final design: Two feather-like sculptures, each weighing about 1,500 pounds and modeled after ostrich feathers, will frame a 500-pound, steel-reinforced, hurricane-resistant sculpture of a woman holding a hibiscus stamen (Jan Emfield’s favorite flower) in her hand, which is outstretched skyward. Some call the statue the hibiscus lady, though Spalding refers to it as “the universal woman.”

The entrance brings a visitor to the formal garden, which will be the site’s showiest flower garden, planted through the seasons with different species to provide color year-round. Plants will be set out by season: poinsettias at Christmas, for instance, deciduous gingers and pentas during the summer heat, petunias in winter. The formal garden will have a “public-park feel to it,” according to Whipple, with benches looking out on a lakeside curving trellis with bougainvillea growing on it, and with a view across the lake.

Turning down the path to the left, or south, takes a visitor to an Asian garden with bamboo and a contemplative lagoon, while vegetation planted near the street will buffer traffic. Aquatic plants like pickerel weed, canna lilies, duck potato and blue-flag iris will be in the lake, in front of a stone-paved, private seating area. At the next corner, to the west, comes the social pavilion, an open-air, octagonal building that can be used for a variety of functions—which might include tai chi lessons for hospital employees, or public events like poetry readings, according to Whipple. It could even serve as a place where hospital patients who miss their pets can visit them.

Next comes a children’s garden, underwritten by Bill and Sue Dalton, board members. It’s not a playground, but it will include sculptures of children, and other bronzes—a sea turtle, for instance—that kids can crawl and play on. There also will be a sandbox, wishing well and koi pond, chimes that kids can play by hand, and a little stage. The site will also include a shade garden, and a wall bearing a plaque naming the garden’s founders. Another plaque will honor Lavern Norris Gaynor, whose family has given Naples and Collier County many other parks and public spaces, and who provided the hospital its original garden in the 1980s, when her father was a patient. Many of the garden’s original trees, including two large banyans damaged by Hurricane Wilma but still healthy, will stay, according to Smallwood and Whipple. Some that were in bad shape have been removed; others have been moved; a half-dozen more will be added.

A buff-colored concrete path will lead visitors through the garden and around the lake, and a boardwalk made of a sustainably harvested Brazilian hardwood called ipe will traverse a cove. To make the garden accessible to hospital patients, the path will be wide—six to eight feet—and made of slip-resistant material; cracks and joints will be kept to a minimum. Although the garden is a memorial to a woman who died from cancer, it’s envisioned as something for all hospital patients - as a place where stroke and cardiac-care patients can take their first tentative steps to recovery, for instance—and also for hospital employees, as a place where they can take a break from their high-stress jobs, and for the public too. And in its downtown location, it’s easily accessible to the public, thus meeting another of Jan Emfield’s wishes, according to Bob Emfield—that the garden be close to public transit. In many ways, the garden is unusual, not only for Collier but in a broader sense, and the designers are hoping that it will garner attention locally and also beyond the county.

“We’re hopeful that this can be a prototype for more major healing gardens in association with more major hospitals throughout the country,” Smallwood said. “This is unique. I’ve been in practice for 33 years here. There is no other garden in Collier County that to me will compare to this.”

It’s been 13 years since Jan Emfield died and made her request to D’Amico - 13 years of negotiating with countless city and hospital officials, 13 years of trying to cut through red tape. The garden that’s grown at NCH has also been the result of three years of design and physical work, and $2.4 million that’s been raised—through donations, through golf tournaments, through fundraising events like the Naples Music Festival, and through Tommy Bahama stores, in which specific lines of clothing have been dedicated to raising cash for the garden. Some employees have participated in triathlons to bring in money.

“My wife, Bunny, and Bob and his wife, Jan, were close, and we hung out a lot together, and it was a commitment we all made to get her this thing built,” D’Amico said. “It’s one of those things that you just can’t let go, if you know what I mean. A lot of times we came to roadblocks. But not building this garden never entered the process. Somehow or other we were always going to figure a way to make it happen.”

The foundation’s already raised the $2.4 million it needed to create the garden, and is halfway to the $1.2 million endowment needed to maintain it. D’Amico’s confident that it will reach that goal soon. “Minneapolis is pretty generous,” D’Amico said. “But Naples is in a whole other league as far as supporting our efforts.”

The second thing that Jan Emfield asked D’Amico to do that night she asked him to build the garden, Bob Emfield recalled, was to take care of him after she died. “Rick says that the garden was the easiest part,” Emfield said with a laugh. But he thinks that Jan Emfield would like what’s happened with the garden: “I think she’d be really proud. It’s coming out to be bigger in reality than I ever suspected it was going to be.”