Sitting here in the courtyard at Michael's Genuine Food & Drink in the Design District, the place she calls ''Miami's salon,'' artist Michele Oka Doner is giving high priestess.

There is something almost transcendent about the Miami Beach native who has spent her career exalting the trinkets of her childhood: the seashells, palm fronds, seed pods, bits of coral and tropical leaves and blossoms that washed up at her feet or floated toward her on the breeze.

Perhaps her trademark look gives her that spiritual air: The flowy, handmade silk tunics that fill the closets of her SoHo loft and her mid-Beach condo (black ones for New York, white ones for South Florida), the dark hair pulled into a classical bun, the regal way she carries her tall frame.

Or it could be the way she speaks. Luxuriously, in unhurried, committed sentences, as if there were nothing but time.

''I was always conscious of my enormous bond and reverence for the place where I was born,'' says Oka Doner, whose book Miami Beach: Blueprint of an Eden, written with another native, Wolfsonian Museum founder Mitchell Wolfson Jr., was recently reissued by a HarperCollins imprint. Originally published by Germany's Feierabend Unique Books in 2005 for double its $49.95 list price, it is not only a personal scrapbook (Oka Doner and Wolfson are from prominent Miami Beach families, and their fathers served as Beach mayors) but also a broad historical, social,even geological and botanical, account of how the city came to be what it is today.

''My earliest memories are all natural events,'' Oka Doner says over falafels and greens. ``I remember when we still lived on 30th Street, it poured at Flamingo Park, where we were playing. My father had a 1949 black Cadillac, very curvy. And we got into the car and drove six or seven minutes to the house, where the sun was shining. I just couldn't reconcile this, to the point that I remember the exact feeling today. How could there have been all this rain at the park, and here the ground wasn't even wet? The other thing I remember was standing on the lawn and smelling the smoke and seeing the clouds from the Everglades when it burned.

``I remember the great hurricane of 1950, and that the palms that stood on either side of the sidewalk were gone in the morning. They hadn't fallen; they weren't bent over. They didn't exist at all. All there was were the holes. These are my primal memories.''

But what she remembers most clearly is being transfixed by the Atlantic. Because she still is.

``From the horizon, I understood the concept of infinity even before I knew the word. I would watch the waves, how they kept coming up and back. And I saw that it was something that had been there before me and would be there after me. Don't ask me how I understood this. But it was the leavening to everything I did.''

Miami Beach, the book (last week, Miami Beach Mayor Matti Bower gave a copy, along with the key to the city, to visiting Prince Andrew), is a collection of memories and memorabilia. Inside: sheet music, blueprints to iconic architecture, recipes from the Wolfson and Oka families, photos of long-gone lushness and still-standing landmarks befitting two nostalgic old-timers who, in the mid-1990s, took a road trip to check out Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps buildings through the South.

''Mickey was driving, and I was singing,'' Oka Doner says. 'As we crossed the Suwannee River I somehow remembered the Orange Blossom Song, and he started singing it with me. I said, `Now, how do you know that?' That got us into a 'Do you remember this? Do you remember that?' We had never talked about doing a book, but by the time we hit Ohio I was taking notes. We played with titles between Ohio and New York.''

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