Lukas Nursery Butterfly Encounter in Oviedo, Florida

Learn About Lukas Nursery Butterfly Encounter

To gardeners and butterfly lovers, Lukas Nursery is a place where you can easily spend several hours and never notice the minutes going by.

Located in Oviedo (20 minutes northeast of Orlando), it’s a fourth-generation, family-owned “agri-business,” located on Slavia Road. It’s a giant nursery where you can buy flowers, plants, and trees, plus gardening and landscaping tools and accessories, and enjoy a year-round butterfly and bird conservatory.

Lukas Nursery’s Butterfly Encounter was named by the Orlando Business Journal as one of the top 25 largest tourist attractions in Central Florida.

Housed in a 4,000-square-foot conservatory, the Butterfly Encounter is home to an extensive variety of native butterflies, a covey of button quail, and an aviary with exotic, multi-colored finches.

Field trips and tours are available Monday through Friday at a price of $8 per ticket. Tours are recommended for ages 5 and older. Tours go through the conservatory and include the butterfly farm—where you can watch caterpillars and chrysalises live and hatch.

Want to release live butterflies at an upcoming event? Lukas Nurseries sells native Florida butterflies for purchase and release at weddings, parties, memorial services, and special events. (Butterflies must be released in Florida.) Pricing per butterfly varies:

$6 for Painted Ladies ($72.00 for a dozen)

$8 for Buckeyes, Peacocks, Zebra Longwings, and other medium-sized butterflies

$10 for Monarchs and other large butterflies ($100 for a dozen)

$96 for 1 dozen assorted butterflies

After touring the Butterfly Encounter, spend time on the rest of the property. Wander through the rows of plants (there are over 2000 varieties of exotic and unusual plants alone) to select annuals, perennials, vines, groundcovers, shrubs, palms, and trees.

Visit the garden center to purchase supplies or get help with a gardening issue. You can bring in a plant sample or a pest (in a sealed container) and a Customer Care team member will help you identify or diagnose the problem.

Want some pottery or outdoor garden art? Lukas Nursery has one of the largest selections in the area. Find colorful glazed planters, classic terra cotta pottery, baskets and accessories, garden statuary, concrete fountains, bird baths, hand-tuned windchimes, and garden and patio furniture.

It’s unlikely that Paul Lukas and Mary Klimek, two young Czechoslovakians who crossed the ocean to America in 1899 and 1905, met in Ohio, and married in 1908, could have foreseen that Lukas Nursery would be the eventual product of their union. They moved from Ohio to Oviedo in 1911, raised six children, founded St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, and became farmers.

Lukas Nursery was established in 1973 by grandson Paul Jr. Then covering just enough land to hold 50 one-gallon pots of plants, today Lukas Nursery covers 24 acres of container and field-grown plants.

The Details

Hours: Mon-Sat 8:30-5:30; Sunday 9-5

Location: 1909 Slavia Road, Oviedo, FL 32765

Phone: 407.605.2104

Website: https://lukasnursery.com

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