Mother Tree Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park

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Find the best place to stay — Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park

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How many vacation rentals are available around Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park?

Our 2022 property listings offer a large selection of 7 vacation rentals around Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park. From 5 house rentals to 5 , find the best place to stay with your family and friends to discover the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park area.

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This is the Mother Tree Treehouse in Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park in ‪#‎Florida‬. It's built in a 175-year-old live oak tree. The treehouse was built in 72 days beginning in Jan. 2015 by DIY Network's The Treehouse Guys. It's three stories and has 450 square feet of living space. And, it's pretty nifty inside, definitely not like any other treehouse I've seen. ‪#‎lovefl‬ ‪#‎fowa15‬ ‪‬

LIVE OAK| Kids love treehouses, but this treehouse is far from kid's stuff, what with its granite kitchen countertops, mini-fridge, air-conditioning, flat-screen TV and soon-to-be working bathroom.

You'll find it at the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park, looking down on a picturesque bend of the slow-moving Suwannee River.

It's perched high in a sprawling, 175-year-old live oak that's been dubbed Mother Tree.

Its three stories - deck, living area and sleeping loft - are built on and around the live oak's branches. One of the branches, complete with Spanish moss, even comes through a wall, traverses the living room and wanders out the ceiling.

No ordinary treehouse, this.

In fact, it was the feature attraction in Tuesday's episode of "The Treehouse Guys" on the DIY Network, which showcases a variety of the elaborate structures.

Slideshow: Spirit of Suwanee treehouse impresses

It's built mostly of Southern yellow pine, much of it harvested from the park. Inside, there are about 450 square feet of living space, all gleaming wood.

That's reached from the deck via an exterior aluminum spiral staircase, which might give those with acrophobia some pause, especially going down.

The treehouse is topped by a green metal roof, 45 feet above ground level. It's in the Suwannee River flood plain, but high enough to ride out even a 100-year flood.

It was designed by Oregonian Michael Garnier, who's built almost 100 treehouses, including a 16-unit treehouse bed-and-breakfast resort in his home state.

"I'll openly admit, this is one of the best I've done," he said.

Garnier is at home in the Spirit of the Suwannee park, about halfway between Jacksonville and Tallahassee off I-10. In 1998 he built an elaborate treehouse that looks right out at the park's meadow stage.

That was the first of many he would build for hire. And while working on it, he poked around the music park and identified the Mother Tree as the ideal site for another treehouse.

He had befriended Jean Cornett, matriarch of the family that founded the Spirit of the Suwannee park 30 years ago. It's now the site of bluegrass, country, folk and rock concerts throughout the year.

"Everything you see out here, short of some roads and a couple of picnic structures, was mom's doing," her son Charles Cornett said.

In recent years, Jean Cornett decided she wanted another treehouse, so she and Garnier talked again.

"If mother wants it, generally it happens," said her son James Cornett, president and CEO of the music park.

Construction, which began in January, took 72 days.

On Feb. 1 Jean Cornett rode a hydraulic lift up the platform, to see the view. The next day, many drums with thousands of gallons of water were put on the platform to demonstrate to authorities that it could bear the weight of a treehouse.

There were many well-wishers there that day - a day the family now calls "Magic Monday" - and Jean Cornett stayed around to greet them all.

The next day she felt ill. Three days after that, she died at age 86.

The construction crew from Oregon kept working. But they pooled their money together to have an artist from their state sculpt a beautiful interior door depicting the treehouse and Jean Cornett in front of it.

It's now up in the treehouse she wanted.

Garnier admitted the Mother Tree, while majestic, did offer some challenges.

Figuring out where and how to place a structure was "a head-scratcher" for him and his lead carpenter Javier Aranzubia.

"With these branches going every which way, you really design on the fly," Garnier said. "We came up here, built a platform and figured out where to go from there."

No live branches were cut during construction, Garnier said, and special bolts of his own design were used to support the building with minimal damage to the tree.

Hydraulic lifts helped get the wood where it needed to be. Workers swung from ropes much of the time while doing their jobs.

The cost?

"That's the first question everyone asks on the tours," Charles Cornett said.

The official answer? "A lot."

The treehouse will soon be available for rent, the Cornetts said. For now, it's being visited by tour groups on Saturdays at the music park ($8 for adults, $4 for children, generally from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., by reservation).

It's proven a popular attraction, the Cornetts said.

Garnier knows why: "Treehouses bring out the kid in everybody," he said.

Plus there are other advantages, he's learned.

"People don't look up into trees either," he said. "It's a good place to hide."

Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082

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