GARDENS: Washington Oaks Gardens State Park

Check out these charming gardens, beach and river on Florida's east coast. Page 3.

We visited Washington Oaks Gardens State Park dead center in the middle of the winter so I suspect we didn't really experience the best of what the park has to offer in the way of flowers.

The Earth Day celebration planned for the weekend April 24-25 would probably be a great time to catch the park at it's flowering best.

The camellias were in bloom during our visit, as were a variety of other plantings along the paths.

Although I am rather clueless about flowers and their names (a weakness I could address by reading the identifying signs offered generously throughout the park) I always enjoy beds of flowers for the memories they bring of time spent with my grandmother.

She was a handful and a half around people, but all it took was a flower bed or chirping nest of birds to melt her demeanor into an enthusiastically amiable disposition. As I wheeled her around on errands, I learned to love flower beds too! :-)

This would be a great garden no matter where it was, but the experience of Washington Oaks Gardens State Park is greatly enhanced by it's location between the Atlantic Ocean and the Matanzas River. The ocean is across AIA, but the river is only a few steps away from the garden.