Lettuce Lake Park Tampa
— the cypress swamp where the river slows.
Not only on a wall.
Lettuce Lake Park Tampa, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A county park where a long boardwalk lifts the visitor a few feet above a cypress swamp on the Hillsborough River. Anhingas dry their wings on the railings. The observation tower at the far end looks out over an oxbow the river forgot to leave. Alligators do the thing alligators do — almost nothing, for hours. A quiet place ten minutes off I-75. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Lettuce Lake Park is a 240-acre Hillsborough County conservation park on the west bank of the Hillsborough River, about ten miles northeast of downtown Tampa. The signature feature is a 3,500-foot raised boardwalk that traces the cypress floodplain to a wooden observation tower overlooking the river. An audubon-style nature center, picnic shelters, and a canoe and kayak launch round out the park. It sits within the Hillsborough River watershed that also feeds Hillsborough River State Park further upstream.
The lake is not really a lake. It is a slow oxbow of the Hillsborough River, a 54-mile blackwater stream that runs from the Green Swamp down to Tampa Bay. The tannins from cypress and oak leaves stain the water tea-brown, and the current barely moves through the floodplain forest. Bald cypress and water tupelo stand with their knees out of the slack water. Wading birds work the shallows — great egrets, little blue herons, the occasional roseate spoonbill drifting through from the coast.
The park opens at 8 a.m. and closes at sunset, and there is a small per-vehicle entrance fee at the gate. Mornings before nine are the quiet window — alligators warming on the banks, barred owls still calling from the cypress. The boardwalk is flat, stroller-friendly, and shaded for most of its length. The observation tower at the river bend adds another forty feet and a view across the floodplain. Canoes and kayaks launch from the dock near the nature center.
