Orlando Layover Near Harry P. Leu Gardens
Part of the full Orlando Layover: ICON Park and Lake Eola, MCO
Harry P. Leu Gardens fills fifty acres on North Forest Avenue north-east of downtown Orlando with more than two hundred camellia varieties, Florida’s largest formal rose garden and an 1888 farmhouse, and three museums share one lawn a little over a mile away at Loch Haven Park.
Two hundred varieties of camellia at Leu Gardens
Harry P. Leu and his wife Mary Jane planted this estate for years and then handed it to the City of Orlando in 1961. What they left runs to more than forty collections across fifty acres: the camellias they brought back themselves, Florida’s largest formal rose garden, an outdoor butterfly garden, a stretch of tropical planting, and oaks two centuries old with trails cut under them. The white farmhouse at the centre dates to 1888, was home to four families, and is shown by docents from Tuesday to Sunday.
Adults pay $15 and children aged four to seventeen pay $10, but the first Monday of every month is free to everyone. The gates open at nine every day except Christmas; closing shifts between four and six with the season, and the last admission is an hour before it.
Anyone who would rather have the rest of the day booked in advance can line it up on a tours and activities platform.
The Orlando Science Center’s white drum at Loch Haven Park
A windowless white cylinder stands at the corner of Princeton Street: 207,000 square feet of exhibit floors that opened on 1 February 1997, six times the size of the science centre it replaced. Inside are the Dr. Phillips CineDome, whose screen runs to 8,000 square feet, and the Crosby Observatory on the sixth floor, which holds Florida’s largest public refractor telescope and opens for viewing on set Saturday evenings.
Earl Cunningham’s folk paintings at the Mennello Museum
Earl Cunningham was a sailor and a wanderer who taught himself to paint, and he worked the Atlantic seaboard he knew, Florida, Maine and Nova Scotia, into flat, bright, unnatural landscapes. He died in 1977; the museum built around his paintings opened in 1998 in the old Howard Phillips house beside Lake Formosa. Adults pay $5, children nothing, and the second Sunday of each month is free.
The Orlando Museum of Art on North Mills Avenue
The city’s art museum has been running since 1924 and holds American work from the colonial period to 1945, alongside African and ancient American collections, behind a curved concrete front on North Mills Avenue. Adults pay $20 and seniors $12; it closes on Mondays, opens from ten to four Tuesday through Friday and from noon on weekends, and drops the charge entirely on the third Thursday of the month, when it also stays open later.
Almost none of the mile between the gardens and this lawn has shade over it, and Central Florida’s afternoon storms turn up most summer days.
No bus runs direct from here to the airport
Nothing in the LYNX network connects this corner of Orlando to Orlando International Airport (MCO) in one ride. The route is a bus into downtown and then Link 11, which alone is about 45 minutes for a flat $2, so the whole chain wants three hours in hand. A car does it in roughly half that. If the timings look tight, the downtown route around Lake Eola sits much closer to the airport bus and is the safer afternoon.
Left at a storage point, the bag misses fifty acres of garden path and a mile of unshaded pavement in between, which is most of what this afternoon consists of.
Frequently asked questions
What should I do during a layover near Harry P. Leu Gardens in Orlando?
Walk the gardens first: fifty acres on North Forest Avenue, more than forty plant collections, Florida's largest formal rose garden, and an 1888 farmhouse at the middle of it with docent-led tours from Tuesday to Sunday. Adults pay $15, and the first Monday of each month is free to everyone. A loop of the main collections takes an hour to ninety minutes, which leaves time for the three museums standing on one lawn at Loch Haven Park, a little over a mile away. Last admission to the gardens is an hour before closing, and closing moves between four and six depending on the season, so check it before you build the afternoon around it.
When are the camellias actually flowering?
December through February. The collection runs to more than two hundred varieties, many of them brought back by Harry P. Leu himself, and it is one of the largest in the southeastern United States. Outside those months the rose garden, the butterfly garden and the tropical collections carry the visit instead, and the 200-year-old oaks are there whatever the date.
Can you walk from Leu Gardens to Loch Haven Park?
Yes, it is a little over a mile and flat the whole way, though almost none of it is shaded until you reach the park itself, where oaks and brick roads take over. Three museums sit on that one lawn: a science centre, an art museum running since 1924, and a folk-art museum in a converted house on the lake.
Can you reach Loch Haven Park by bus?
Yes. LYNX Link 125 serves the park, which is useful if the walk up from the gardens looks too hot to be worth it. The three museums sit close enough together on that lawn that one bus stop covers all of them, and the gardens themselves are back on North Forest Avenue at the other end of the same walk.