What Became of Cypress Gardens?

March 10th, 2020

   Cypress Gardens in central Florida used to be one of America’s best-known public gardens and top tourist attractions.

Cypress Gardens still exists… it’s just now rolled into Florida’s Legoland theme park.

   Then it struggled through three decades of ownership changes, declining attendance, hurricanes, and the Disneyfication of the region, finally closing in 2009.

   A lot of people assume it’s been gone ever since with the space taken over by the Legoland Florida theme park.

   Although it’s a far cry from its 200-acre glory days of the late 1930s through 1960s, much of Cypress Gardens lives on as a part of Legoland near Winter Haven, Fla. And the 30 or so acres still in plants is a beautiful tropical garden, filled with winding paths through palm and cypress trees and lush beds of colorful tropical shrubs.

   I saw it earlier this winter for the first time since 1974, when the other two main attractions were the waterski shows and the “Southern belles” wearing their Civil War-era hoop dresses on the lawn by the Gardens’ signature gazebo.

   Legoland still runs a few ski shows a day on the park’s Lake Eloise with the once-famous human pyramids replaced by skiers dressed as Lego characters.

The wedding chapel gazebo is a signature feature. That’s a Lego Southern belle in front of it.

   The belles are gone altogether, save for one life-sized Lego belle stationed near the gazebo’s entrance.

   Cypress Gardens is billed as one of the lands within Legoland, alongside several ride areas, the ski-show theater, a water park, and a really impressive Miniature Land of famous places throughout the world built in scale size out of Lego bricks.

   There’s no extra charge for Cypress Gardens, but you have to buy a general admission ticket to get in the park to see it. You can’t just buy a gardens admission.

   The Gardens are roughly the size of Hershey Gardens and mostly naturalized tropical in appearance. They’re not really theme gardens, i.e. a rose garden, herb garden, or conifer garden.

   Instead, these gardens are mostly laid out in masses of nicely paired combinations, intended to stroll through rather than study as in a botanical garden.

   The most famous plant is the huge banyan tree, a type of fig with the curious trait of growing trunk-like structures by sending down aerial roots from branches that eventually penetrate the ground and grow in it.

The huge Cypress Gardens banyan tree.

   This particular banyan is one of the biggest I’ve ever seen. Its trunks have been “walking” out from the original 1936 planting to cover an area nearly 100 feet across with a canopy almost double that.

   Cypress Gardens’ founder Dick Pope planted the tree as he was first converting the land from a yacht club into what grew into a tourist attraction that rivaled the draw of the Grand Canyon.

   Today’s Cypress Gardens has a variety of other interesting trees, including southern magnolias, an oddball sausage tree with large, fat, elongated fruits, and, of course, lots of Florida-native cypress trees that gave the place its name.

   The bulk of the gardens are filled with tropical shrubs and groundcovers – many of which we know more as houseplants, such as split-leafed philodendrons, crotons, gold-variegated scheffleras, bromeliads, wandering Jews, and moses-in-a-boats.

One of the landscaped paths leading through Cypress Gardens.

   There’s also a large formal planting of annuals, several superb vistas into and from the lake, and several bridges, fountains, and statues, not to mention the iconic gazebo that was in the background of so many Southern-belle tourist photos from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

   Pope and his wife, Julie, opened Cypress Gardens on Jan. 2, 1936, as a botanical garden.

   She was more of the plant-fancier, and he had a flair for delivering what tourists of the day wanted.

   The Gardens quickly morphed into an early version of a theme park when the Popes added boat rides through the gardens, waterski shows during World War II, and then the Southern belles. (The original idea of the first belle was to draw attention away from a rather large ornamental vine that had died the winter before.)

   Cypress Gardens soon became known as the “water ski capital of the world” as more than 50 skiing world records were set there.

Behind the landscape lagoon is the lake where the ski shows take place.

   Attendance got a big boost when Hollywood filmed several movies there, including the first wide-screen-format film (“This Is Cinerama”) and a series of Esther Williams films and TV specials.

   By the 1960s, Cypress Gardens was one of America’s most visited and popular tourist attractions.

   Then along came Walt Disney World about 45 minutes to the north. At first, Pope welcomed the new megapark idea and saw an increase in attendance at Cypress Gardens.

   But then, Disney began sucking up and retaining more and more of the region’s tourism dollars, leading to a drain on many of the old-school Florida attractions (including the once-popular Jungle Gardens near Fort Pierce on Florida’s east-central coast).

Read more about what’s now McKee Botanical Garden and several other Florida public gardens

   In the early 1980s, the Popes retired and turned Cypress Gardens over to their son, Dick Pope Jr. He decided to sell it to a book publisher who owned SeaWorld parks in 1985, and that began a chain of sells, resells, revampings, and bankruptcies that ended with the park’s closing in 2009.

   British-based Merlin Entertainments, the world’s second biggest theme-park operator, bought the land in 2010 and converted it into Legoland, which I found to be clean, well maintained, especially attractive to the under-12 age group, and a whole lot less crowded than the Disney parks.

   To Merlin’s credit, they invested in returning the Gardens to excellent condition and keeping them beautifully maintained.

   Many theme parks have nice landscaping and garden beds, but I can’t think of another one I’ve seen that has a full-scale public garden folded into the grounds.

   Central Florida has several very nice public gardens worth visiting – Orlando’s Harry Leu Gardens, Sarasota’s Marie Selby Gardens, and Lake Wales’ Bok Towers among them.

   Cypress Gardens is another one worth a couple of hours.  You just have to know it’s inside Legoland.