Sunken Gardens and Historic Kenwood: A St. Petersburg Day on the Gulf Coast

There is one day on the Florida Relaxation tour when we turn our backs on the Gulf and head inland. It is Day 8 — Monday, January 18, 2027 — and it is built around a garden that a plumber dug out of a drained pond more than a century ago, and a neighborhood of 1920s bungalows where a remarkable number of the front rooms are working art studios.

It is also, quietly, the most beautiful day of the week.

Sunken Gardens: one man, one pond, one hundred years

In 1911 a plumber and keen gardener named George Turner Sr. bought 4.1 acres of land in what was then the edge of St. Petersburg. On it sat a shallow body of water called Curlew Pond, formed in a natural sinkhole.

In the early 1930s, Turner did the thing that made the place. Using an elaborate maze of clay drainage tiles — plumber's work, applied to a landscape — he drained the pond and discovered what gardeners dream about: a deep bed of rich, damp muck, sitting several feet below the surrounding ground level and sheltered from wind and frost.

He planted it. Then he kept planting it. By the time he began charging visitors a nickel to walk through, he had created a subtropical garden in a bowl, where the canopy closes overhead and the temperature drops a few degrees as you descend the path.

The gardens stayed in the Turner family for decades and very nearly disappeared in the 1990s. What saved them was a vote: local citizens agreed to a one-term tax increase specifically to preserve the site. Sunken Gardens was designated a protected Local Historic Landmark in 1998, and its distinctive main entrance was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. A restored History Center opened on the site in 2022.

What you actually walk through

The garden is a loop, and the whole appeal is that it is slow.

Paved pathways wind past waterfalls and koi ponds, under tropical palms and through beds of orchids, past cascading planting on both sides. Tom's Christian Tours' itinerary puts the collection at more than 500 species of plants, and even in January — when much of North America is bare — the place is dense, green and flowering.

There is wildlife too, some of it very used to visitors: flamingos, parrots and a good deal of birdsong that is not coming from a speaker. It is the kind of environment where people who do not think of themselves as garden people end up taking forty photographs.

Why it suits a Level 1 tour

We choose stops for this itinerary as much on terrain as on interest, and Sunken Gardens is close to ideal.

The pathways are paved and wheelchair-friendly, there is accessible parking, and restrooms are on site. The route is a gentle loop rather than a climb, there are benches, and there is shade. Nobody is being hurried. If you want to sit by the koi pond for twenty minutes while the rest of the group finishes the loop, that is a perfectly normal way to visit.

This is the same principle that runs through the whole tour: one good thing per day, at a pace that leaves you with energy for the evening.

Lunch in downtown St. Petersburg

From the gardens it is a short hop into downtown St. Pete for lunch, which is on your own.

Downtown St. Petersburg has changed enormously over the past twenty years and is now one of the most walkable city centers on the Gulf Coast — a compact grid of independent restaurants, coffee houses and waterfront parks. There is enough within a couple of blocks that a group of forty can scatter to whatever they feel like eating and still be back at the same corner on time. Guests who move quickly sometimes use the gap to look at the waterfront or the shops; others sit down properly and take the hour.

It is worth knowing what else is in the neighborhood, even though it is not part of the day. Downtown is home to the Dalí Museum, which holds one of the largest collections of Salvador Dalí's work anywhere in the world, and to the St. Pete Pier, a modern waterfront complex with gardens, viewing decks and cafés. Neither is included in the itinerary and neither fits inside a lunch break — but guests who fall for St. Petersburg on this day occasionally come back to the area on a later trip specifically for them.

Historic Kenwood: bungalows and an artist enclave

The afternoon goes to Historic Kenwood, and it is the stop most guests have never heard of before they arrive.

The neighborhood began in 1912, when a developer named Charles Hall bought 160 acres of avocado groves and subdivided them. Most of the houses went up between the 1920s and the 1950s — with a further 170 structures physically relocated into the neighborhood during the 1930s — and the result is street after street of Craftsman-era bungalows: deep porches, low-pitched roofs, tapered columns, mature trees meeting overhead. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.

What makes it worth a visit rather than a drive-through is what happened next. Kenwood is home to a thriving Artist Enclave: painters, potters, printmakers, glass and jewelry artists who live in these bungalows and work in them, with galleries and studios woven into the residential streets. Hall's own 1918 model home now operates as the Craftsman House Gallery.

You are, in effect, walking around someone's neighborhood and being welcomed into the front rooms. It is flat, shaded, unhurried, and about as far from a souvenir stand as Florida gets.

An included dinner to close the day

The day ends with an included group dinner — one of the more than 24 meals covered across the twelve days — and by this point in the week, that matters in a way it would not have on Day 1.

You have been traveling with these people for eight days. Nobody is making small talk any more. Our guests have a habit of turning into a group that trades Christmas cards and books the next trip together, and dinners like this one are where that actually happens.

The St. Petersburg day at a glance

• •Day 8 · Monday, January 18, 2027
• •Morning: Sunken Gardens — paved paths, accessible parking, on-site restrooms
• •Midday: lunch on your own in downtown St. Petersburg
• •Afternoon: Historic Kenwood arts district — galleries and studios
• •Evening: included group dinner
• •Terrain: flat, paved, gentle loops — suited to a Level 1 pace

The wider trip

The St. Petersburg day sits inside Tom's Christian Tours' Florida Relaxation tour, running January 11–22, 2027. It is a twelve-day motorcoach trip from Wisconsin to Florida's Gulf Coast and back — no flights, no airports, no driving — with seven nights at the Holiday Inn & Suites Clearwater Beach, more than 24 included meals, and a deliberately relaxed Level 1 pace. Prices start at $3,200 per person based on double occupancy, with a $500 deposit.

Pick-ups run from Green Bay, Appleton, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, Lomira, Allenton and Milwaukee. If you have questions about walking, steps or accessibility, call us before you book — we would far rather have that conversation now than have you discover the answer in January.