July 14, 2026
Moon Lake, New Port Richey: The Four Miles of Roses in the Pine Flats
In the 1930s a Clearwater hotel man ringed a Pasco County lake with 35,000 rose bushes and four miles of blooms, and drew Rex Beach and a Vanderbilt to a dude ranch in the pine flats
Between 1934 and 1936, someone bedded 35,000 rose bushes around a lake northeast of New Port Richey — enough to ring the water with four miles of blooms. Alongside them went 11,000 palms, 70,000 amaryllis, 5,000 azaleas, and rare fruit trees and lilies planted in the lagoons to keep something flowering year-round. All of it went into a stretch of Pasco County pine flats that had been a hunting preserve.
The man behind it was Ed Haley, who owned the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater. His Moon Lake Company began developing the property in 1933 — a tract described in the historical marker as a 9,000-acre sportsman's paradise. Haley built the ranch out between 1933 and 1937, and by the time it opened, the grounds around the lodge held a public garden, walkways, a rodeo ring, and a lakeside dance floor big enough to compete with the other Florida garden attractions of the era.
That combination — a working dude ranch with rodeo and hunting, wrapped in an ornamental garden of tens of thousands of flowering plants — was the draw. This was the 1930s, when garden attractions dotted the state and a resort lived or died on whether it could pull travelers off the road. Haley's answer was scale. Four miles of roses is not a flower bed. It is a landscape rebuilt to be looked at.
The guest list matched the ambition. Rex Beach, the novelist and screenwriter whose adventure stories were turned into films, stayed at Moon Lake. So did Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. And at one point the Florida Legislature held an informal parley on the grounds — lawmakers gathering at a rose-ringed dude ranch in the Pasco backcountry to talk business away from the capital.
The property carried a nationally known reputation as a game preserve. Accounts put its origins as a hunting operation as early as 1929, before Haley formalized the resort, and describe it as one of the more expansive hunting preserves of its time. What Haley added between 1933 and 1937 turned a place people came to shoot into a place people came to be seen.
None of the roses are there now. The name survives in the ground: Moon Lake is an unincorporated community and census place in Pasco County, with a population of about 4,800 as of the 2020 census, and Moon Lake Road runs through it. The neighborhood that grew up on the old ranch land is called Moon Lake Estates. The Vanderbilt-era resort left its name on the roads and the subdivision and little else you can point to.
The lake itself still behaves the way Florida lakes in this part of the state do. In September 2018, Pasco County closed Moon Lake Park after water levels rose fast enough to alarm homeowners around the shore. That same year, a fifteen-foot-wide sinkhole opened in the Moon Lake area along Pearl Drive, roughly ten feet deep in the backyard of two mobile homes, and four homes evacuated voluntarily. The Southwest Florida Water Management District has published minimum and guidance levels for the lake — the paperwork of a water body that swings between too much and too little.
The community around it has done its own tending. In February 2019, neighbors organized a second Moon Lake cleanup, working through an area that had struggled with illegal dumping and code violations. It was volunteer labor on a lake that once drew a Vanderbilt — the same shoreline, a very different crowd, doing the unglamorous work of hauling out what other people left behind.
The historical marker in New Port Richey now carries the whole arc: a 9,000-acre sportsman's paradise, development begun in 1933 by Ed Haley's Moon Lake Company. It stands where the dude ranch stood, in a landscape that no longer looks like anything a hotel man would plant 35,000 rose bushes across.
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