Bok Tower Gardens — bell tower
Averette · CC BY 3.0

Bok Tower Gardens

  • 2 min read
  • 27.935° N 81.578° W

Interesting facts

  • Bok tried several times to bring flamingos to the sanctuary, and early drawings show them at the reflecting pool, but cold winters and predators killed them.
  • Nightingales imported from England were also released here and likewise failed to thrive in the relatively cool central Florida climate.
  • Bok asked Milton Medary for nothing less than the most beautiful tower in the world, and later wrote a short book about it titled America's Taj Mahal.
  • The sixty bells never swing: they hang fixed in the eighth-floor bell chamber, and only their clappers move, driven from a keyboard in the room below.
  • Eight glazed ceramic grilles near the top of the tower, by J. H. Dulles Allen, are each about 35 feet tall.
  • The Anton Brees Carillon Library on the fifth floor holds some 3,000 carillon scores and about 1,600 recordings, named after the tower's first carillonneur.
  • The sanctuary began as a bird refuge of only about 25 acres and has since grown to roughly ten times that size.
  • In 1941 a Terrytoons cartoon, The Bird Tower, reimagined the Singing Tower as a resort hotel run for birds, with its bells woven into the plot.
  • The Lake Wales Ridge was once a chain of islands, and its isolated habitat shelters gopher tortoises, eastern indigo snakes and the Florida mouse.
  • The El Retiro mansion, a twenty-room winter home of 1930–32, was built for C. Austin Buck, a vice-president of Bethlehem Steel.

Why it is worth it

On one of the highest points of the Florida peninsula, a pink-and-grey marble tower rises 205 feet above a reflecting pool and a garden of live oaks, palms and azaleas, and from its top a carillon of sixty bells sounds across the orange groves below. Bok Tower Gardens was conceived in the 1920s by Edward Bok, the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, as a sanctuary for birds and for people, and it is today a National Historic Landmark.

Bok and his wife Mary Louise Curtis Bok wintered near the Lake Wales Ridge in 1921 and bought the crest of Iron Mountain to keep it from development. They hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to turn the dry sandhill into a garden: irrigation came first, then thousands of truckloads of soil, then a planting plan of some 1,000 live oaks, 10,000 azaleas, magnolias, sabal palms and gordonias. The sanctuary has since grown to about 250 acres and attracts more than a hundred species of birds, from wild turkeys to sandhill cranes.

The Singing Tower, designed by Philadelphia architect Milton B. Medary, was built between 1927 and 1929 and dedicated by President Calvin Coolidge on 1 February 1929. It is a Gothic Revival composition with strong Art Deco detail: square at the base, turning into an octagon at 150 feet, clad in pink Etowah and grey Creole marble from Georgia and coquina from St. Augustine. Lee Lawrie carved its sculpture of Florida birds, plants and animals; Samuel Yellin forged the ironwork and the Great Brass Door with thirty scenes from Genesis; J. H. Dulles Allen made the coloured ceramic grilles near the top. The tower also held water tanks for the garden and Bok's study at its base, and a moat around it now holds koi. Medary received the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal for the project but died months after the dedication; Bok died in January 1930 and is buried in front of the brass door. The sixty bells were cast by John Taylor & Co of Loughborough, England, and the tower also houses one of the largest collections of carillon music in the world.

The grounds also include a 1930s Mediterranean Revival mansion, El Retiro (Pinewood Estate), and a longleaf-pine nature trail through the rare sandhill habitat of the ridge.

Getting there

The gardens lie about 4 km north of the town of Lake Wales in Polk County, central Florida. The nearest airport is Lakeland Linder International Airport (LAL), about 44 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Florida 5The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful Bell Towers 9The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in the United States 10The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

Bok Tower Gardens is a 250-acre (100 ha) contemplative garden and bird sanctuary located atop Iron Mountain, north of Lake Wales, Florida, United States, created by Edward Bok in the 1920s. Formerly known as the Bok Mountain Lake Sanctuary and Singing Tower, the gardens' attractions include the Singing Tower and its 60-bell carillon, the Bok Exedra, the Pinewood Estate now known as El Retiro, the Pine Ridge Trail, and the Visitor Center.

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