Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
dock (if you love quaint names, you'll love Florida botany!). Another common immersed
plant, bur marigolds, can paint whole prairies yellow.
Across Florida, whenever land rises just enough to create drier islands, tracts, hills and
hillocks, dense tree-filled hammocks occur; ecological zones can shift as dramatically in
1ft in Florida as they do in a 1000ft elsewhere. These hammocks go by many names de-
pending on location and type. Tropical hammocks typically mix tropical hardwoods and
palms with semideciduous and evergreen trees like live oak.
Another dramatic, beautiful tree in Florida's swamps is the bald cypress, the most flood-
tolerant tree. It can grow 150ft tall, with buttressed, wide trunks and roots with 'knees' that
poke above the drenched soil. Cypress domes are a particular type of swamp, which arise
when a watery depression occurs in a pine flatwood.
GHOST HUNTERS
Florida has more species of orchids than any other state in the US, and orchids are them-
selves the largest family of flowering plants in the world, with perhaps 25,000 species. On
the dial of botanical fascination, orchids rank highly, and the Florida orchid that inspires
the most intense devotion is the rare ghost orchid.
This bizarre epiphytic flower has no leaves and usually only one bloom, which is of
course deathly white with two long thin drooping petals that curl like a handlebar mus-
tache. The ghost orchid is pollinated in the dead of night by the giant sphinx moth, which
is the only insect with a proboscis long enough to reach down the ghost orchid's 5in-long
nectar spur.
The exact locations of ghost orchids are kept secret for fear of poachers, who, as Susan
Orlean's book The Orchid Thiefmakes clear, are a real threat to their survival. But the
flower's general whereabouts are common knowledge: South Florida's approximately
2000 ghost orchids are almost all in Big Cypress National Preserve and Fakahatchee
Strand Preserve State Park. Of course, these parks are home to a great many other wild
orchids, as are Everglades National Park, Myakka River State Park and Corkscrew Swamp
Sanctuary.
