Exclusive: Lukas Nursery to redevelop, expand Butterfly Encounter and Learning Center

It’s easy to miss what Edna Kane sees when she walks around the Butterfly Encounter part of Lukas Nursery & Butterfly Encounter in Oviedo. 

It’s a slightly overcast day, but the inside of the Encounter is a balmy 80 degrees – just the way the butterflies like it. There are doves, finches and puffy blue Chinese button quails hopping around. The birds are the cleanup crew who snack on dead butterflies. 

Inside the butterflies’ airy home, Kane points to a wild lime tree that’s been stripped bare because an army of giant swallowtail caterpillars have consumed it. In their wake, only the exuviae, the husks of their chrysalises, remain. 

Nearby, small, orange dots on the hoptree leaves are actually eggs that will also one day hatch into caterpillars that become giant swallowtail butterflies. 

Kane holds a newly-hatched monarch butterfly hanging upside down from her finger like a bat. That monarch butterfly is female, she says. 

“She’s got no scent pouches, and you see her veins are really thick right here? That’s how you can tell it’s a female,” Kane said. “So her wings are still a little wet. I’m gonna put her back in here, let her finish drying.”

Kane has been with the Lukas Nursery & Butterfly Encounter for almost 19 years, nearly since the Butterfly Encounter, which is technically a butterfly farm, got its start in 2004. 

When the Butterfly Encounter first spread its wings, the Lukas family didn’t know if it would take off. Now, it’s a community staple, welcoming some 20,000 visitors annually. The name has changed to match its popularity: Lukas Nursery & Garden Shop is now known as Lukas Nursery & Butterfly Encounter. 

Lukas Nursery & Butterfly Encounter is about to enter its own chrysalis and emerge next year with a redeveloped site. Slavia Road will soon be expanded, and the current Butterfly Encounter will become a parking lot. 

Fear not, though, as the Oviedo business isn’t going anywhere. Construction is expected to start in the next few weeks on a new Butterfly Encounter – a larger butterfly farm on a different tract of the property that’s already cleared out. The new site is being designed with the capability to get licensed to grow non-native butterflies. 

When Kane thinks about the current building, she’s torn. On one hand, she remembers the marriage proposals, the ‘promposals’, the butterfly memorial releases for lost loved ones, the school kids – and adults – who learned that butterflies don’t bite. Her kids, now adults, were in elementary schools when she started working here.

On the other hand, she’s also asking to be the one driving the tractor to tear the building down.

“So when the building was made, it was made on a shoestring budget, and it was two friends that put it together,” Kane said, noting visible areas of wear in the building. “This facility has definitely served its purpose. It has raised a generation. And I’m sad that this one’s going to go, but I’m super excited to see what’s going to be next.”

Editor’s note: Do you have photos and stories from the early days of the Butterfly Encounter? Send them to us here or email contact@oviedocommunitynews.org. We might even feature them. 

A redeveloped Lukas Nursery: the biggest capital project since its inception

Lukas Nursery is an institution in Oviedo.

In 1911, a small group of families banded together to form the Slavia Colony Company to acquire land in present-day Oviedo, with Paul Lukas as one of the founders. Included with the Lukas family was the Dinda family, the Duda family, the Mikler family and the Stanko family, among others.

The farm is now on its fourth generation of family ownership with Caleb Lukas, his brother Stanley Lukas II, and sister Cecelia Lukas Waldrop owning the nursery. 

As a falling late morning mist blows through gray skies just outside the cavernous retail barn that dominates the front of the nursery, he looks up for a moment at his great grandparents staring back at him from a five-foot-wide black-and-white photograph, burned sepia with time, that hangs high on the north wall. Look at that photo, and you’re staring in the same direction as the row crop field they worked a century ago. It’s just across Slavia Road, once a dirt path, then two lanes of asphalt, now set to become a 4-lane, divided thoroughfare cleaving the original core of Lukas Nursery even more broadly in two. 

Older plans for the road expansion had it taking land from the retail side of Lukas Nursery; instead, the county will now take land from the northern side of the business, cutting down a line of 21-year-old oak trees in the process.

Caleb points to that high-hung photo, to a curious set of wooden boards covering the bases of the celery stalks. He can’t help but turn historian for a moment.

“So the unique thing about growing celery at that time is, I guess it was a trend to have more white-colored stalks of celery than what we have known as celery as green stalks,” he said. “So they would put the boards pressed up against the sides of the celery there to kind of bleach it out. If it didn’t get the sunlight, the chlorophyll, you know, wouldn’t be able to make that stalk green.”

At one point, the founding family brought crops to market in Winter Park, with Paul Lukas also selling his services as a cobbler, fixing shoes while selling celery. The family were immigrants from Czechoslovakia, with most members of the family speaking Slovak. 

The settlers also helped build St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, another Oviedo institution. At one point, the family sold eggs from the “Happy Egg Farm,” and began selling ornamental plants in coffee cans in the early 1970s. 

The Happy Egg Farm eventually became Lukas Nursery. And for Caleb, now the chief financial officer of Lukas Nursery, his earliest memories at the nursery go back to childhood, putting his hands to work for the first time.

“As soon as I was old enough to pull a weed,” Caleb said. “And so those early memories are definitely there from being out in the field, pulling weeds to, as I grew up, throwing sod and or checking folks out on the cash register, restocking plants, loading plants into customer’s cars, to checking folks out on the cash register. My growth within the family business has been from the bottom up. Likewise with my siblings.”

After Caleb’s father died, it gave him and his sibling the direction to get “heavily involved” in the family business. Caleb has his own young children now, and he views his legacy as one of preservation. 

“How do we preserve the legacy that has been established before us? And so I think the hallmark of our generation’s impact on the business is how well we can preserve and adapt to the external threats and changes that will impact the business,” Caleb said. “The most pressing one coming is the Slavia Road expansion project. It’s no doubt going to impact our business, and we have to be nimble and adapt. And that’s why we’re kicking off this whole site redevelopment project.”

Caleb said he gets messages at least once a week asking about selling the property for development. 

“We get offers thrown at us quite often, and every time an offer comes, we up it by an absurd amount, hoping that they get the hint that we’re not interested,” Caleb said. “We definitely want to maintain the legacy and the stewardship of this property.”

The redevelopment will touch nearly every part of the Lukas Nursery property. Behind the main barn where customers check out is a huge swath of land where the plants are kept. Keep going back and you’ll find a greenhouse. 

The area currently adjacent to the greenhouse will become a new, separate Learning Center for field trips, built to model an old school house with capacity for 100 guests or students at once. 

Next to the Learning Center, a 9,822-square-foot Butterfly Encounter will also include a new coffee shop. The current Butterfly Encounter is about half that size, not counting the gift shop.

“One of the big upgrades for the new (Butterfly Encounter) is that it will be fully enclosed and climate controlled,” Caleb said. 

Still, the climate will still be set for the butterflies – around 80 degrees and 80% humidity.

“But it also will provide a little bit of a comfort level for the guests, so that during high heat or rainy times, those elements of weather can be mitigated,” Caleb said.

The plan is to have the new Butterfly Encounter and Learning Center finished by the end of 2026; other parts of the project will take until 2027 to finish.

The cost?

“Probably estimated (at) about a $5-$6 million project over the various phases to completion,” Caleb said. “We have to carefully navigate and plan around, of course, the seasonality of the business, in order to minimize the impacts of our customers’ shopping experience.”

Lukas Nursery & Butterfly Encounter By the Numbers

• Size: 18.38 acres (Development Area 6.20 acres)
• New Butterfly Encounter: 9,822 square feet (including the gift shop)
• New Learning Center: 2,800 square feet
• Employees: Currently 70 (which could increase slightly with the expansion)
• Visitors: 20,000 annually 
• Timeline: Construction is expected to start in October, with the new Butterfly Encounter and Learning Center finishing in 2026. The rest of the redevelopment is expected to take until 2027. 
• Year founded: Lukas Nursery and Garden Shop was founded in February 1973. The retail side grew from a legacy of row farming known as the Lukas Farm that went back to the Slavia Colony Company, founded in 1911. 
• Butterfly Encounter: Opened in 2004
• Expansion cost: $5 to $6 million

Chickens, cows and butterflies – oh my

One aspect of the nursery is connecting people to nature, and Oviedo’s past.

On a Tuesday afternoon, Austin Coates is holding a chicken, when a student asks: Did that chicken just lay an egg?

“No, she could have just pooped, though, they’ve done that to me before,” Coates said, to cries of “ew” from the kids. 

Coates, a sales associate, goes on to explain that the chicken he’s holding – named Verbena II – is a Buff Brahma breed. It has feathers on its toes, and is native to India, where it was bred to be bigger. 

The theory is that the feathers on the toes act like a feather duster in the sandy soil.

“Yes, she uses those little talons to scrape away the sand in her native habitat to then hopefully find bugs and seeds and other little things she might like to snack on,” Coates said. 

When you think about Oviedo, chances are, you probably think of chickens. The same is true for Lukas Nursery. 

In fact, on many tours students take of the Butterfly Encounter, you can find a small enclosure behind the register with chicks. 

That’s one reason why the chickens are going to continue to be a part of the tours at the new Butterfly Encounter. But with the changes to the site, two other kinds of farm animals featured – cows and donkeys – will be phased out and moved offsite. 

“So that will be one area that we’re very sad to see go,” Caleb said. 

A butterfly encounter’s legacy lives on

The man who helped spearhead the Butterfly Encounter at Lukas Nursery will only be there in spirit for the new facility. 

The family business went through another transition in 2004, when an idea from Caleb’s uncle, Phil Lukas, and his entomologist friend Michael Rich germinated into the Butterfly Encounter. 

Phil Lukas, affectionately known as Uncle Phil, died on March 28. To this day, when Edna Kane walks by Phil’s old office, she still expects him to be sitting there, she said. 

Kane remembers one of the last conversations she had with Phil. 

“He told me, he goes ‘Edna, I probably might not see the new Butterfly Encounter come to pass,’” Kane said. “And it hit me so hard. And I was like, well, Phil, you know, I’ll make sure it’s done right.” 

Kane, despite nearly 20 years at the Butterfly Encounter, does not have a butterfly garden at home. She doesn’t take her work home with her. Instead, she grows succulents – plants that thrive on neglect. 

But at the end of a long day, she often goes into the Encounter to take a moment for herself. 

“I get to walk in the Butterfly Encounter, stop and just reflect and just take in the beauty of the butterflies, just nectaring, some of them roosting, and just really stop and just let the day just go,” Kane said. 

Kane said there will be a pond and a waterfall in the new design that will be an homage to Phil. She said every decision with the new Butterfly Encounter was made with him in mind. 

“And I think that he would be absolutely tickled by it all, I really do,” Kane said. “I think he was a very private, quiet man, and I can see him kind of sit back and rock on his heels and just smile.”

Correction: A previous version of a photo caption misidentified a Queen butterfly as a Monarch butterfly