A Visit to Bok Tower Gardens

Joan and I had the pleasure of visiting Bok Tower Gardens a couple of weeks ago and had a great time. And I did get a slew of photos. I’ll be able to get a handful of them into this posting.

The gardens at Bok Tower Gardens are truly extraordinary. I won’t be featuring any photos of the actual tower at Bok Tower Gardens here; that will have to wait for me to break some time free for another photo editing session. But the gardens — taken just by themselves — are quite extensive and stunningly beautiful. This path leads to… well, it leads to more of the gardens, of course.

Near the foot of the tower is a reflecting pool that is a fine focal point for folks like me carrying a camera around. I took many here from different vantage points and will, no doubt, be featuring more of those in the near future. The one below is my favorite from among the 20 or so pictures that I took of the pool and the beautiful scenes all around it.

There are spots within the gardens where your eyes just might play tricks on you. In the photo below, it can seem as though the area around this modestly-sized pool is a part of a much larger tableau. And though it’s not a puny scene by any means, it seems as I look at it now to be only a small part of a scene along a free-flowing river that meanders through the beautiful, bucolic countryside for many miles.

The founder of Bok Tower Gardens is Edward W. Bok, an author and editor who became wealthy in the early 20th Century in the publishing business. He wrote a couple of books of note and was well-known in his time as an intellectual and a lover of the outdoors and of the beauties of Nature. He had a saying and visitors at the famed gardens that bear his name can read it in several places within the bounds of those lovely spaces which have served well as the theme for today’s post.

We enjoyed our visit to Bok Tower Gardens earlier this month. Enjoyed it immensely. And we most certainly will be going back in the near future. Just as soon as we’re anywhere near Lake Wales. If you’re interested in making a visit of your own, you can find the appropriate info right here. If you’d like to learn a bit about the history of the gardens in particular, this page would be a good place to start.

“Bulldog Ben” Basile

© 2021 Ben Lawrence Basile

Photo credits Ben Lawrence Basile