When you walk around the vast expanse of Walt Disney World, be it in a park or at a resort, you can’t help but be struck by the shear beauty of your surroundings.

The landscaping throughout the developed sections of the nearly 30,000 acres is wonderfully whimsical and picture-perfect, with nary a rose petal out of place. There are colorful budding flowers at almost every turn; tall, leafy trees swaying in the breeze, and neatly cropped bushes all accentuated by finely cropped grass.

In short, Walt Disney World’s landscape is straight out of a botanical magazine.

In the mid-1960s, when plans were set in motion to build what would become known as the Vacation of the World, the 27,000 acres of land which then encompassed Walt Disney World was anything but picturesque.

It was, in fact, a total mess.

With WDW’s 40th anniversary just days away, it’s interesting to look back at just what Walt Disney’s many top executives thought during their initial visits to what was then known as The Florida Project.

John Hench, who began his career at Disney as a sketch artist and became an integral member of Walt Disney Imagineering during the latter stages of his career, spent many hours in Walt’s office in California going over plans and ideas for the big East Coast project, his creative juices salivating at the thought of making Walt’s dream come true.

"Walt and I talked so much about what we could do with all that space," Hench said in 1996. "I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it."

But on his first trip to the site of the Florida Project in central Florida, his opinion quickly soured. "The site was so vast. The soil was appalling. There were massive spreads of land the surveyors hadn’t even researched because the vegetation was so impenetrable."

Dick Nunis — at the time, Disneyland’s chief of operations who would go on to play a pivotal role in Walt Disney World’s construction and during WDW’s early years — was another executive whose first visit to the property left him aghast.

"I went out in a Jeep with a surveyor. He said, ‘Here we are.’ I looked around at all the swamp. It just scared the hell out of me."

Bob Foster, the Disney attorney who helped purchase the thousands of acres needed to bring Walt Disney World from architects’ renderings to concrete reality — all while going by the pseudonym Bob Price in an effort to hide Disney’s identity and keep land prices dirt cheap — got his first peak at the property from a Grumman Gulfstream airplane in the early 1960s.

"The place was so big," he said. "It took 20 minutes just to fly around the property line. We all wondered if the people in Orlando knew what we were gonna do to them."

After returning from the flyover, Foster, too, was dumbfounded. "It was a jungle," he said. "We all thought, ‘Oh my God, what has Walt gotten us into?’

"Those 27,000 acres was our nemesis," he added. "We spent 1965 and 1966 struggling with what we were gonna put on the property."

Those struggles, according to former Disney Imagineering head Marty Sklar, led to "so many arguments about the land" among Disney’s top executives. "But they all left and left me behind to work things out."

Sklar was particularly impressed with how the land looked — from the vantage point of several hundred feet above. "It looked beautiful ... from a helicopter," he said.

Indeed, legendary Disneyland photographer Carl Frith made dozens of flights over the WDW property during just about every phase of construction, capturing that beauty by taking "absolutely stunning photos," according to Sklar.

There were a host of other problems related to the land. Orlando Ferrante, former Vice President of Engineering, Design and Production for Walt Disney Imagineering, remembers his first visit to the property. "I looked around and thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ There was absolutely no support in the area, no place to eat, no place for the guys (the more than 7,000 construction workers) to get a beer after work."

William (Joe) Potter was weeks removed from his position as executive director of the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair when he was brought in to supervise the Florida site. He certainly had plenty of experience working in tropical environs — he was a major general in the Army Corps of Engineers and was the former governor of the Panama Canal Zone as well as the former man in charge of the Panama Canal Corporation.

Potter’s job at Walt Disney World was monumental — he was in charge of clearing the land, sidestepping snakes and alligators and bulldozing through the muck and thick native flora.

During the early phases of construction, the Walt Disney Company was literally creating something out of nothing and much preliminary work needed to be done. Vegetation was everywhere on the Florida site and major water and drainage issues had to be addressed.

Canals and levees were built to help control water flow; lakes were drained, cleaned and refilled; energy plants were constructed; sewage treatment and fresh water systems were installed. In addition, electrical conduits and underground telephone lines were put in place.

That was all Potter’s handiwork. Seven million cubic yards of dirt had to be moved just to get the Magic Kingdom ready for construction.

In all, there were 55 miles of levees and canals that had to be carved out of the swampy soil.

"It was John Hench who insisted on meandering canals to follow the contours of the land," Disney Archives founder Dave Smith said, alluding to the fact that Disney wanted to be as environmentally responsible as possible during those early days of construction.

Forty years later, it's easy to look at the beautiful landscaping and overlook the massive preliminary work that needed to be completed before Walt Disney World could rise up from the water-logged soil. But that would be a mistake.