Lake Eola is the Green Heart of Orlando

Full view of Lake Eola Park, fountain and ducks

Downtown Orlando stretches from Lake Ivanhoe on the north to Lake Lucerne on the south. Right in the middle is Lake Eola Park. It's about forty five acres more or less evenly split between lake and land. The park is at the core of much of downtown's activity and has been for over a hundred years. A monument on the east side says it was placed at the site where Orlando Rees, the city's namesake was killed by Seminole Indians in 1837.

Southside of Lade Eola Park


As a native of Orlando, my memories of the park go back to my grandparents taking my sister and I down when we were barely able to walk or talk and feeding the ducks and swans. I repeated the ritual with my godson David when he was not much older. Some things are always fun.

The Sunday Farmer's Market at Lake Eola is always a blast



From the ages of six to nine I attended art school in a two story Victorian house at the southeast corner of the park. Once a year the school sponsored a contest where people from all over would come for a day to paint in the park. Likewise there was a fishing competition and one year when I couldn't have been older than five, I won!

Painting from SW side of Lake Eola featuring the main attraction, the fabulous center fountain

This painting which is also visible on my website, floridagardengallery.com, was painted summer 2008. I've now been painting the park for fifty years. I still enjoy looking at it.

A postcard from 1914 of the Sperry Fountain. The same fountain my above painting was created after.

The wonders of the park are too numerous to describe. One is no longer there, having lasted about fifty years and ending in the late seventies. It was the sweet pea wall, a fabulous multi tiered annual bed that boasted as many as seven tiers ending in a ten foot trellis of sweet peas that smelled as beautifully as they looked. For two summers in college, I was the assistant to the city of Orlando landscape architect. One of my jobs was to visit all of the parks and draw the annual beds so that he could twice a year plot the layout of the season's annuals. The most elaborate was the sweet pea bed. We were told that Kodak reported it was one of the ten most frequently photographed spots in the country.

Ariel view of 1930's Orlando and the Lake Eola bandstand.

One of the water features of Lake Eola Park include this pond with a magnificent bronze sculpture and bridge with lovely scenic view of downtown Orlando in the background