Volusia County Stories / Port Orange
Dunlawton Sugar Mill Gardens: The People Who Keep a Layered Place Alive
Leave it to Florida to put a dinosaur near a sugar mill and then grow a garden around the conversation. What I love about Dunlawton is how much human care lives within that wonderfully unlikely combination.
01
A place with several lives
Dunlawton Sugar Mill Gardens holds several kinds of memory in the same ground. The mill ruins carry the weight of an industrial past. Concrete dinosaurs preserve the imagination of an earlier roadside attraction. Growing around them is a botanical garden, alive with the choices and effort of people who believe this place deserves a future.
Those layers give the Port Orange garden a character that could never be assembled from a standard attraction checklist. A plant can draw your eye toward a piece of masonry. A dinosaur can interrupt a serious thought with a smile. The landscape keeps opening another conversation.
The pleasure is in that coexistence. Florida history contains ambitious schemes, difficult truths, exuberant invention, and people willing to begin again. Dunlawton has room for all of them.
02
The garden was somebody’s decision
The garden’s own history identifies local nurseryman Martin Wittbold as the person who formed Botanical Gardens of Volusia in 1985. An agreement with the county gave the organization a way to begin a new chapter for the property.
That is the part of the story I find especially moving. Admiring an old place is easy to understand. Taking responsibility for its next season asks considerably more. A garden requires people to return after the original enthusiasm, when the work is ordinary and the weather has its own ideas.
The county describes a nonprofit organization with no salaried employees. That gives the beauty here a human dimension. The paths and plantings express time that people have chosen to give. The result is a public pleasure built through private acts of generosity.
03
A dinosaur, a palm, and an honest history
The concrete dinosaurs date to Bongoland, the attraction created by Dr. Perry Sperber, who commissioned Manny Lawrence to make them. They retain the charm of a time when roadside Florida was willing to be gloriously peculiar. Their survival gives the garden a welcome streak of humor.
The older ruins require a different kind of attention. This was a plantation sugar mill, and its history includes enslaved labor. The county’s account of slavery at the plantation sites belongs within an honest understanding of the place. The beauty of today’s garden can coexist with respect for the people whose lives and labor were bound to that earlier system.
Preserving a place can make room for fuller understanding. The garden’s value grows when its different histories remain visible, with the gravity or delight each deserves.
04
Something living to carry forward
The plant collections add another generous purpose: helping local gardeners understand what can grow here. Palms, native plants, succulents, and other collections make knowledge visible in a living landscape. The garden offers the quiet encouragement of seeing what patient care can make possible.
That relationship between beauty and practiced knowledge also runs through Barberville Pioneer Settlement. In both places, people keep a local inheritance active by doing the work themselves.
Dunlawton feels valuable to me because its character has accumulated. It holds the seriousness of the ruins, the absurd happiness of the dinosaurs, and the forward-looking promise of a garden. Somebody planted for a season they hoped other people would enjoy. Somebody came back to care for it. That is a lovely thing for a community to have.