Hike Bike Paddle Camp Florida with authors Sandra Friend and John Keatley as your guides
Public gardens, private garden attractions, and botanical gardens
At Eden Gardens State Park, lush cultivated gardens surround the historic Wesley House, a restored antebellum plantation home built by timber baron William Henry Wesley in 1897.
Tropical gardens from the 1920s grow lavishly around the historic winter homes of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford at the Edison & Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, their centerpiece one of the biggest banyan trees in the United States.
Established in 1938 as one of the world’s largest collections of tropical plants, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden is an integral part of the history of Florida botany and of Coral Gables.
From its roots in a citrus grove, a nonprofit botanical garden sprouted through the efforts of Floyd and Lula Wray. In 1927, they purchased 320 acres to grow citrus and a year later, Floyd hired Frank Stirling to create a botanical garden for test planting of tropical fruit and flowering trees.
Walk through the garden gates into a wonderland of sensory stimulation. With nearly 180 acres in the heart of Largo, the Florida Botanical Gardens is a place for peaceful immersion.
Designed in 1938 as demonstration gardens by the Garden Club of Palm Beach to show the diversity of tropical plants available for landscaping in the region, the Four Arts Gardens offer a peaceful retreat from the surrounding downtown area.
From its humble beginnings in 1944, Fruit and Spice Park has blossomed into a showcase of tropical fruits, flowers, and spices grown commercially in the Redland
Once a miniature golf course, this two-acre waterfront park just north of the Vinoy in St. Petersburg became the Gizella Kopsick Palm Arboretum, a lush showcase of palms, in 1976.
Fifty acres of lush formal gardens hug the shores of Lake Rowena in this urban display of botanical diversity in Orlando. The center of it all is the Leu House, purchased by Harry and Mary Jane Leu in 1936 – now a house museum – around which they developed their gardens.
Site of the Crimmins Nursery in the 1930s, the 3.5 acres of gardens at Heathcote Botanical Gardens are a peaceful retreat within the city of Fort Pierce, offering wandering pathways through a variety of themed plantings, with many whimsical mosaic benches on which to sit and relax.
At Spanish Point, scents hang heavy in the morning air: a moonflower in the act of closing for the day, the sweetness of citrus blossoms, the purple morning-glory clambering over mangroves, the brush of salt breezes.
A beauty spot along Lake Mirror in downtown Lakeland, Hollis Garden is a collection of themed garden rooms
