‘The Giving Gene': What Drives Cope Garrett's Generosity

In 1998, Alfred Cope Garrett started thinking about posterity. He was 65 years old, and during a visit to a garden in Maine, a memory struck him. Many years earlier, he had ventured out on what he calls a “walkabout,” a five-month journey that took him from the South Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand up through Southeast Asia and all the way to Japan.

Garrett—known as “Cope” to friends and family—was traveling by himself, and while he was having fun, he would occasionally grow lonesome. On one such day, finding himself in Christchurch, New Zealand, he decided to visit the city’s famed Hagley Park and Gardens. Roughly half the size of Central Park, Hagley Park has been at the heart of public life in Christchurch since the 1850s, and it is lined with pathways that snake through gardens teeming with majestic old-growth trees, colorful azaleas and camellias, and other magnificent displays. Overwhelmed by the beauty he discovered, Garrett spent two full days exploring the grounds.

Those memories rushed back at him as he stood in that garden in Maine in 1998. Before leaving, he happened to notice that a local foundation had supported the creation of the garden, and so when he returned to Sarasota, he reached out to a former attorney of his and asked who he should call about setting up a fund to create a garden of his own. The answer that came back: the Community Foundation of Sarasota County.

With that guidance, Garrett planted the seed for what is today the Garrett Garden and Green in Mount Washington, Massachusetts. Garrett’s great-grandfather had purchased land in the area decades before and built a house on a ridge near a spring-fed lake. The family began to spend their summers in Mount Washington, a tradition carried down to Garrett’s generation.

The region maintained a special place in Garrett’s heart in part because that was where, in 1943, he met Anne, whom he would reconnect with and marry decades later, in 1997. Anne was a land planner and expert gardener, and she and Garrett used rotary mowers to clear the land for what would become Garrett Garden and Green themselves. At the time, Garrett and Anne were too old to have children, but Garrett says the garden become the couple’s “baby.” After the land was cleared, 60 trees were planted, and these days, the grounds are free and open to the public.

The Mount Washington garden is just one of the many causes that Garrett has supported over the decades, and his legacy has touched dozens of nonprofits in Sarasota and beyond. In fact, as he likes to joke, he’s “addicted to giving.”

Garrett will turn 93 this year. He’s lived in Sarasota off and on since 1948, when his parents brought him here as a child from Philadelphia. The family lived on Siesta Key, and Garrett only recently moved from the island to the mainland after becoming what he calls “hurricaned out.”

In the ’40s, Sarasota was a “jewel of a small town,” Garrett says, but it was tough on his father, who was a highly educated board-certified physician who ran into resentment from other doctors in the area. But the family stuck it out, and Garrett found his place on the football field. He played left end for Sarasota High School, a position that often forced him to block the opponent’s biggest players. When his mother saw him get knocked to the ground during a game, she told him, “Son, if you’re going to play this game, you’re going to have to toughen up.” He did. He made first team at Sarasota High during his junior year and was voted the team’s most outstanding player by his teammates during his senior year. “I never played as well before or after that,” Garrett says. Football eventually earned Garrett a scholarship at Florida State University.

Garrett served in the Coast Guard from 1952 to 1956, traveling everywhere from the Caribbean to Japan. With the help of the G.I. Bill, he finished college in 1961 at the age of 28 and returned to Sarasota to become the first admissions officer at New College. He eventually turned to commercial real estate and became a key player in the development of Siesta Key and other areas around Sarasota. Married three times, he has three children, and has been a member of The Field Club for 51 years. On Dec. 5, 2012, while having lunch at the club with several friends from the Community Foundation, Garrett suffered a stroke, but thanks to quick intervention from the waitstaff and care from Sarasota Memorial Hospital, he recovered. Every year on Dec. 5, he hosts a lunch at the club to celebrate those who helped him.

Over the years, Garrett became a major benefactor for many nonprofits. He has supported Sarasota Ballet, Sarasota Orchestra, Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota Art Museum, the New College Foundation, the Sarasota Memorial Healthcare Foundation, Seminoles Boosters, and St. Boniface Episcopal Church on Siesta Key. He’s also been a consistent supporter of the Community Foundation’s Season of Sharing initiative, which provides emergency help to families in crisis.

One recent project has united Garrett’s commitment to giving back with his love for gardens and green space. Garrett went to high school with Elling O. Eide, who passed in 2012 but whose legacy lives on at the Elling Eide Center in south Sarasota. Eide graduated from Harvard University with a degree in far Eastern languages and studied in Taiwan, collecting Chinese literature and art and eventually amassing more than 60,000 objects. Garrett remembers Eide as “absolutely brilliant.”

The Eide Center, which opened in 2016, is a private research library that houses Eide’s collection of rare books, manuscripts, art, garments, and textiles—much of it from pre-modern China—and it attracts Asian scholars from all over the world. It is situated amid a 72-acre nature preserve, right across Little Sarasota Bay from where Garrett lived for decades. The property is a significant archaeological and anthropological site in its own right—a place that was home to the indigenous people of Florida for centuries.

A recent gift from Garrett will help the center purchase and plant a number of Asian and native plants on the Eide Center grounds. The donation was made in honor of Garrett’s mother, Adelaide McCulloh Jefferys Garrett, who was born in Shanghai in 1907 to missionary parents before being brought back to the United States at a young age. Nearly three decades after helping create Garrett Garden and Green in Massachusetts, Garrett is doing something similar here at home. “I decided I’d like to have a hand in a garden in Sarasota,” he says. “It’s pristine land, and there’s not much of that left.”

Looking back on his decades of philanthropy, Garrett says he inherited “the giving gene” from his parents and those who came before him. “My mission,” he says, “is to give to people who have needs."