Hike Bike Paddle Camp Florida with authors Sandra Friend and John Keatley as your guides
These public lands offer tram tours that enable you to see part or all of a trail system by being driven around, ideal for those with limited mobility. Please check ahead, as some trams are seasonal and others are dependent on volunteer availability.
.Trams
In late winter, azaleas create ribbons of bright color beneath the live oak canopy across the grounds of Maclay Gardens, a series of formal gardens along the hillsides sweeping down to Lake Hall.
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.
It’s the Amazon of North America, home of the ghost orchid. Protecting more than 85,000 acres, Fakahatchee Strand is Florida’s largest state preserve and most certainly our wildest.
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.
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
A swimming hole as a work of natural art, the deep gash in the earth that is Ichetucknee Spring glows an unearthly robin’s-egg blue, cradled in a limestone bowl within a leafy glen
Opened in 1989 on Singer Island, John D. MacArthur Beach State Park is extraordinarily popular due to its coastal lagoons, well-preserved tropical forests, and beautiful beach with nearshore rocky reefs.
Wrapped in a dense blanket of mosquitoes, Lignumvitae Key Botanical State Park is one of the United States’ most significant botanical treasures, a virgin tropical forest home to more than a thousand lignum vitae trees.
With a name straight out of tourist fantasies of 1950s Florida, Lovers Key State Park is a series of slim barrier islands between Estero Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, just south of Fort Myers Beach.
With tall waving grasses, saw palmetto, and the sound of birds, Myakka River State Park is Florida’s Big Sky country, blanketing more than 28,000 acres east of Sarasota
The birthplace of the National Wildlife Refuge system, Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge protects more than 5,400 acres along and in the Indian River Lagoon off Sebastian
With one of Florida’s most beautiful sweeps of beach, Topsail Hill Preserve State Park is a linear preserve with tall dunes along three miles of shoreline
