Bok Tower Gardens sits on top of Iron Mountain, two hundred and ninety-eight feet above sea level, which is the highest natural point on the entire Florida peninsula. That detail is worth pausing on, because it explains nearly everything about how the place feels: the air is a few degrees cooler than the surrounding citrus belt, the breeze actually moves through the live oaks, and the Singing Tower itself, when you finally see it through the gap in the canopy, has the stagecraft of a cathedral rising out of an orange grove. The whole production was the doing of one man, Edward Bok, a Dutch immigrant boy who arrived in Brooklyn in 1870 with six dollars to his name and grew up to edit the Ladies' Home Journal into the most influential magazine in America. By the 1920s Bok was wealthy, retired, wintering on the Florida ridge, and looking for a way to give something back to the country that had taken him in. What he built, with the help of the best designers and craftsmen money could find, was a gift to the American people.
The gardens themselves were laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the inventor of American landscape architecture and, by the 1920s, the senior partner of the Olmsted Brothers firm, the most prestigious landscape practice in the world. Olmsted Jr. happened to be designing the master plan for the City of Lake Wales at exactly the same time, which is why the gardens and the town share a sensibility — sweeping live oaks, sabal palms in formal allées, magnolias and azaleas and camellias arranged with the studied informality that only very deliberate planning can produce. This is what landscape historians call a restorative garden: it is not designed to impress you with rare collected specimens, but to lower your pulse. The peak window is late February through March, when the azaleas explode into color and the carillon concerts pull a quiet crowd onto the Reflection Pool lawn, but November through April is the entire comfortable season for any visit at all.
The two-hundred-and-five-foot Singing Tower at the center of the property is built of pink Etowah marble from north Georgia and Georgia coquina, a fossilized-shell limestone, in a Gothic and Art Deco hybrid designed by the Philadelphia architect Milton B. Medary, who died before the building was completed. Inside the tower is one of the finest carillons in the world, sixty bells ranging from sixteen pounds to nearly twelve tons, cast in England by the Taylor foundry and tuned to play across the entire surrounding landscape. Concerts happen daily at one and three in the afternoon. Bring a blanket, sit on the Reflection Pool lawn, look up through the live oaks, and try to remember the last time anyone built a piece of public infrastructure simply because it would be beautiful. President Calvin Coolidge dedicated the tower in February of 1929, which means Bok Tower opened the same year as the Olmsted city plan for Lake Wales and the same year as the stock market crash that paused both of them.
On the south end of the property is Pinewood Estate, a twenty-room Mediterranean Revival mansion built in 1930 as a winter retreat for Charles Austin Buck, a vice president of Bethlehem Steel. The interior is largely original, the gardens around it are formal in the Italian manner, and the holiday season from late November through early January is when the house is fully decorated and worth its own afternoon, separate from the rest of the property. Self-guided tours are included in your admission. The other detail worth knowing, and one that most visitors walk past, is the Window by the Pond — a small bird-watching hide tucked into the woods on the way back toward the entrance, where a one-way glass panel looks out onto a feeder station that draws pileated woodpeckers, painted buntings in spring, and the regular cast of cardinals, titmice and chickadees. It is the best twenty minutes on the property and it is free with your ticket.
The practical details are mercifully simple. Bok Tower Gardens is at 1151 Tower Boulevard, three miles east of downtown Lake Wales, off Burns Avenue and Mountain Lake Cut-Off Road. It is open every day of the year from eight in the morning until six in the evening, with the last admission at five. Admission is not free; check current rates at the gate or on the foundation's website. Allow at least two hours if you only want to walk the gardens and catch a concert, three to four if you add Pinewood Estate, and a full leisurely day if you want to include lunch at the on-site Blue Palmetto Cafe and a slow walk back through the woodland trails. There is no public transit. There is no rush. There is, for what it is worth, no theme park in central Florida that comes within a hundred miles of what Bok built.