It is open to the public for a per-use ticket fee and also offers yearly membership passes.

In the early 1930s, David Breed Lindsay, a local newspaperman, purchased the grove to create botanical gardens.

Beginning in 1936, admission fees were charged and in 1940, Jungle Gardens opened for business in essentially its current form.

In the early 1970s, Jungle Gardens was sold to the philanthropic Allyn family, who continue to manage it.

The gardens include native species and exotic plants from around the world, such as the Australian nut tree, a bunya-bunya tree, the largest Norfolk Island pine in Florida, bulrush, strangler figs, royal palms, Philodendron selloum, banana trees, Peruvian apple cactus, and staghorn ferns, as well as native red maples, oaks and bald cypress.