A Garden District Day: Leu Gardens in the Morning, Corrine Drive After
Fifty acres of camellias and oaks before lunch, a food-hall graze at midday, vintage racks all afternoon and ramen to finish. The complete Audubon Park day, sequenced the way locals run it.
3 minute read
There is a version of an Orlando day that involves no turnstiles at all. It starts in a 50-acre botanical garden under 200-year-old oaks, moves to a food hall for lunch, spends the afternoon digging vintage racks and ends with ramen or a market dinner as the light goes. That day belongs to Audubon Park, and this itinerary strings it together — gardens first, because in Florida you always give the morning to the outdoors. For a standalone profile of the gardens themselves, see the Mills 50 lane’s Leu Gardens feature; here, Leu is the opening act of a full Garden District day, which is how locals actually use it.
Morning: Leu Gardens, taken slowly
Harry P. Leu Gardens (1920 N Forest Ave) covers 50 acres on Lake Rowena at Audubon Park’s eastern edge. Harry P. Leu, an Orlando industrialist, and his wife Mary Jane bought the property in 1936, spent decades planting it with collections gathered from their travels — camellias above all — and gifted the estate to the City of Orlando in 1961. Today it holds more than 40 plant collections, from camellias and roses to palms and cycads, around the Leu House, an 1888 home whose historic district is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The local knowledge is seasonal: camellia season, running through the cooler months, is the gardens at their most famous, and the rose garden repays a late-spring visit. Go early, walk the lake, take the shaded paths slowly. This is a garden built by collectors, and it rewards being read collection by collection rather than marched through.
Midday: East End Market for lunch
From the gardens it is a short hop to Corrine Drive and East End Market (3201 Corrine Dr), No. 2 in our food hall rankings (92.9). Lunch is the graze: a Hinckley’s Fancy Meats sandwich, poke by the pound at Rion’s Ocean Room, a Winter Park Biscuit Company chik biscuit, cheese from La Femme du Fromage for later, and a Lineage coffee to carry back out into the afternoon. Preorder a Gideon’s cookie box while you are there — the East End shop is the one that takes preorders — and you have solved dessert and the gift problem in a single stop. Our full market profile is here.
Afternoon: the Corrine Drive dig
The afternoon belongs to the racks and bins. The Owl’s Attic (3106 Corrine Dr) and The Lovely Vintage Market (2906 Corrine Dr) sit at No. 4 and No. 5 in our boutique rankings, both at 96.2 — hand-picked clothing at the first, thirty-plus collectors of furniture and décor at the second — and Park Ave CDs (2916 Corrine Dr) has sold records on this street’s orbit since 1984. Build in a coffee reset at Lobos Coffee Roasters (3000 Corrine Dr) or a donut at The Salty (3025 Corrine Dr), and a scoop at Kelly’s Homemade Ice Cream (3114 Corrine Dr) if the day runs warm, which in Orlando is a reasonable forecast most of the year. The full shopping argument is in our vintage shopping guide.
Evening: pick your ending
The day has three correct endings. On a Monday, it is the Community Market in the Stardust lot — dinner from the vendors, music, the neighbourhood out in force. Any other night, it is Domu at East End for Bib Gourmand ramen when the doors open for dinner, or Coro‘s small plates on Corrine if you booked, with a Redlight Redlight pour to finish. And if the day is an occasion, it ends at Kadence, provided you reserved weeks ago. Everything in this itinerary is pinned on the Top Spots Map, and the street-by-street version lives in our Corrine Drive guide. Gardens in the morning, market at midday, vintage in the afternoon, ramen at night: that is the Garden District day, and it is the best non-theme-park day in Orlando.
Photo: KimonBerlin, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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