This is one in a series of occasional reports about South Florida gardens.

Although it’s a warm day, a cool breeze rustles through the live oaks. A black and white Muscovy duck preens under the boughs of a bottle brush tree set on the canal bank.

In the middle of the sweeping lawn that’s part of this 1 1/2-acre retreat, two towering giraffes follow behind two life-size zebras. They are made of bronze, of course. But they are all part of the fun in this Pinecrest garden.

It belongs to Lance Stelzer, a criminal attorney and single dad who finds that gardening is all about relaxing.

“Plants are nice to have around because they don’t yell like judges, stress you out like clients or hassle you like other attorneys,” he says. “Gardening is stress relief without taking a blood pressure pill.”

Although his collection of about 50 sculptures and 100 bromeliads is important to him, he bought this property because it came with a greenhouse. He needed it to raise his prize-winning orchids, including one that took a Best in Show during the 2010 Fairchild International Orchid Show.

He has about 100 vandas and 150 cattleyas as well as 150 other varieties of showy orchids on outdoor tables, hung from live oaks and tucked into his greenhouse.

In fact, the 2,400-square-foot greenhouse is bigger than the 1950s ranch house in which he lives with his 10-year-old son, Jordan.

He got into orchids in 1966, thanks to an ex-mother-in-law who had about 60 of them at her home in Pompano Beach. When she decided to live “a more Bohemian lifestyle” and move onto a houseboat, Stelzer inherited the plants.

“It was like being given children and not knowing how to take care of them,” he says.

Stelzer took courses at Palmetto Senior High School in Pinecrest. “The classes were intensive but made orchid-raising fun,” he says.

At the time, he was living on a half acre in Kendall and keeping the orchids on every outdoor surface he could find, including plastic chaise lounges. But he tired of having to move the orchids indoors every time the temperature dropped below 45 degrees or hurricanes threatened.

“I’d wake up to a lizard smiling at me on my pillow,” he says, recalling the wildlife brought indoors with the potted plants. It took three hours each time he had to resettle them. He also got tired of getting up early to water his orchid collection before work.

In 2000, he moved into his current home with the greenhouse out back. It’s a aluminum-frame, climate-controlled building with roll-up plastic sides and a clear plastic roof.

Here he can control how much sunlight, air, fertilizer and water his orchids receive. A computerized sprinkler system set to run from 6:30 to 7 a.m. daily regulates mist that turns the room into a rain forest. Zones allow him to control how much water different varieties receive.

If the temperature drops, a gentle spray of water from pop-up sprinklers on the gravel floor helps prevent the orchids from freezing. “It can be 20 degrees outdoors but when I walk in here, it’s toasty warm,” he says.

And he can put fertilizer in a five-gallon bucket to be distributed through the system. “Orchids are like children. They need food to thrive,” he says.

You can’t help but notice one of Stelzer’s vandas, a Vasco Buster Brown. It is about three feet in diameter with roots about four feet long dangling from the suspended plant. Its flowers are a reddish brown with vibrant touches of purple.