Winter Garden Heritage & Music Festival 2023

We spent much of the day enjoying the “120th anniversary” celebrations downtown in Winter Garden – our first activity was an interesting (though hard to hear due to all the music) history walk along Plant Street where we learned among other things that it’s really only the 115th anniversary of establishing Winter Garden (a misread in the past of hand written “1908” as “1903”!)

There were lots of food choices with many food trucks and stalls as well as the regular Winter Garden restaurants, all very busy!

And there were five or more stages set up for music and other performances; we enjoyed blue grass, country and other performances at various locations … Here’s some photos from the day:

I did a little video recording of some of the performances, as well:

Winter Garden Heritage Tree walk

This morning we joined “Bloom and Grow” on a walking tour of some of the impressive “heritage” trees in Winter Garden, mostly older trees that have been around since before most of the town existed – or sometimes a tree with particularly interesting history (planted by someone important to the town, for example). All the trees have a plaque that names them with a QR code to scan for more information!

Here’s some photos I took (and head over to their website for more information):

Winter Garden then and now #2

Winter Garden Heritage on Facebook recently posted another downtown Winter Garden picture, this time from 1998 so only about 25 years difference (see my previous “then and now” post with a 70 years difference!); this view shows the building corner where Winter Garden Wheel Works is now located; like last time I tried to get a similar picture angle to show the changes … you can see that back in 1998 the corner building was empty, the road hadn’t been bricked, and the center hadn’t been made into the West Orange trail. The tree in front of the corner has now gone, while the further back one is now taller but doesn’t look so healthy!

1998
2022