GARDENS & LANDSCAPES
Cedar Lakes Woods and Gardens
Levy County · Gulf Coast
Twenty acres of botanical garden built by hand inside a worked-out limerock quarry at 4990 Northeast 180th Avenue, Williston.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The quarry was dug more than a century ago to supply rock for the foundation of Highway 27 and then abandoned. Doctor Raymond T. Webber found it in 1991 and bought it, and over roughly thirty years he and a small crew turned the pit into a garden without using heavy machinery at all. Everything was carried and placed by hand: the walkways, the islands, the stepped pools and waterfalls, the pavilions and the Brazilian walnut bridges that cross the water. Hundreds of plant and flower species grow on the walls and terraces of the old quarry, which gives the garden the enclosed, dropped-down feeling that a level site could not. In January 2014 Webber gave the entire twenty acres to a nonprofit formed to run it, and a further sixty-four acres of adjoining woodland went to Conservation Florida. It opens daily from 9:30 in the morning until 4:45, with holiday variations, and charges admission with reduced rates for children, military and first responders
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