Kathy Turner Lee remembers hollering to her mother, “Going over to the gardens,” as she ran out her front door on 18th Avenue and to a side gate that led into Sunken Gardens. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Sunken Gardens may have been one of the most famous roadside attractions in Florida, but to Lee, the four-acre tropical oasis was just the family business that her grandparents, George and Eula Turner, Sr., founded decades before. It was like an extension of her own backyard.
“The gardens were a big part of my childhood,” Lee recalls. “My brother and I would run around by ourselves and no one thought anything of it.”… Read More