Florida is a remarkable vessel of natural beauty and sweeping historical change. While most people are content just to enjoy the water and warm sunshine, there’s a wide world of distinctive destinations waiting for them from the panhandle to Key West.

Writer Ron Wiggins takes a personalized look at the best of them in his new book, Florida Authentica, a collection of stories and articles on subjects ranging from Collier County’s Corkscrew Swamp to Palm Beach’s Flagler Museum, which drew from him a two-word reaction: “Holy Moly.”

Wiggins, a columnist for The Palm Beach Post from 1974 to 2006, fielded suggestions for the series from readers, who came up with about 80 unique state landmarks and natural wonders. He whittled them down to 50 and went to work.

He already had a good idea of what was essential Florida and what was not after spending most of his boyhood in Gainesville, knocking around swamps and parks and sink holes looking for arrowheads and ancient megalodon sharks’ teeth.

“I grew up in Gainesville, and that’s where my heart is,” he said. “We used to go down to the creek and collect sharks’ teeth, and of course it was a switching offense when you were 7 or 8 years old and unaccompanied by adults. You had to try not to get your pant legs wet, or you were in trouble.”

His favorite attraction is just up the road on the Ichetucknee River, where you can rent an inner tube and float downstream in cool water under a stunning canopy of dense tree foliage. “Although the park is open all year, there is definitely a tubing season,” Wiggins wrote: “You want to go when it is hot.”

This is North Central Florida, but the water is “bracing,” he said. “It starts out around 71 or 72 degrees, and if it’s a summer day it’s going to be hot. With any luck it’ll rain, and you can just lie back watching the rain coming down. You start to get too hot, you can dive in. The water’s so clear you can see the bottom. It’s one of the marvels of the planet.”

So too is the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, 2,000 acres of 600-year-old cypress trees visitors can explore on a 2.5-mile boardwalk that snakes its way through some of the most stunning scenery the state has to offer.

The Corkscrew is a bird-watchers paradise with red-shouldered hawks, herons, egrets, woodpeckers and even eagles. The walk is surrounded by clear, slow-moving Everglades water “the color of weak iced tea,” according to Wiggins.

He added: “It’s marvelous walking through there and thinking, this is what it looked like a thousand years ago. With any luck, in another few hundred years it’ll still look like this.”

Florida Authentica isn’t all about nature; state history is part of the story, too. He added Palm Beach’s Whitehall, home to Henry Flagler and now the Flagler Museum, to his must-see list and was wowed by the architectural beauty and 24-karat contents.

“When I passed under a marble porch supported by six massive columns and peered through bronze doors into a 4,000-square foot marble reception hall,” he wrote, “all I could think of was the improbability of Flagler walking into the hall after a day of tallying hotel receipts and crying out: ‘Honey, I’m home.’

“You step not so much into a mansion as a world of soaring architecture and statuary and paintings worthy of The Winter Palace or Versailles.”

Wiggins also takes a peek at the absurd, as in his chapter on The Spook Hill in Lake Wales.

“Everybody believes that if you park your car on this hill, it will defy gravity and roll uphill,” he said. “It’s an optical illusion, supposedly, except for one thing – it’s not even an optical illusion. It’s not true anyway you want to look at it.”

He waxes wistful, however, about Cypress Gardens, long famous for its flamboyant water ski shows. It was a premier Florida attraction in its heyday, operating from 1936 to 2009 (although it has been resurrected by Legoland).

The creator of Cypress Gardens, Dick Pope, used Works Progress Administration labor in the early 1930s to dig canals and drain land near Winter Haven, sometimes lending a hand himself with his own shovel.

“Pope’s genius was in planning the walkways and canals from a picture-taking perspective,” Wiggins wrote. “Always, he walked around incessantly framing pictures with his hands, making sure that every vista, every prospect loved the lens.”

His water skiing performances made newsreels around the country. But in later decades Florida tourists demanded more elaborate theme parks, and to compete, Cypress Gardens renamed itself Cypress Gardens Adventure Park in 2004. It wasn’t enough, though, and it was shut down in September 2009.

“It couldn’t compete with Disney,” Wiggins said.