While next post we take a look at the broader canvas offered by the boardwalk at Congaree, here today we can catch a glimpse at one of the defining features of the lowland experience. Seen below is the trunk of a Baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum), in fact an extremely large and old one, at chest height, from about ten feet away.
Why yes, the camera has a rough time in 90% humidity. The trees seem to enjoy it, though.
There are other trees of vast scale in the east. Live Oak (Quercus Virginiana) and Bur Oak (Quercus Macrocarpa) are massive sprawlers of immense volume that can dominate nearly every setting they can find enough crown room to stretch out in. Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus) and Florida Royal Palm (Roystonea Regia) can both grow incredibly tall and dwarf a mature forest of some of the tallest eastern and northern Caribbean trees in their respective northern and Floridian/Cuban habitats. For a lovely combination of both features, however, the Baldcypress certainly holds its own. These things are massive in the western redwood family sense of the concept, and just as few of them remain, despite having a much broader range of acceptable native habitat.
It's a shame we don't have more of recorded testimonies from the early European explorers about what they thought of such sights, and why people were so astonished by the western forests when the East put on quite the show for the centuries leading up to their Californian discovery in the mid-nineteenth century. If Americans are more so impressed by frontier than the familiar, then what a wonder a frontier in the eastern backyard must have been. Perhaps words failed so many times, and the redwood family got more attention because people started understanding how so many failing words had started to cause their frontier to disappear before the approach of the civilized world. John Muir came to his botanical passions when growing up in Wisconsin, and fermented them on a long walk through forests such as these to the shores of the Gulf before he set off for California, and by ship rather than experiencing the heart of the continent the long way. His loss! And yes, I just said something bad and silly about John Muir. Makes you want to pay attention to your backyard more, doesn't it?
This can be done! Now, yes, one should plant in favor of letting nature do its thing and not confine the wild to something as ignoble as pot, but when you don't have the room and want to dwell among more than just concrete, well, there are trees that can do that. Even better, there are native trees that can adapt oh so well. Take this lovely creature, since we are talking about the South and all:
You know, in most places they would try to clip the thing into a fine topiary to keep it off the windows. Not here. This was taken on Broad Street in Charleston, South Carolina.
This is a Balcypress (Taxodium Distichum), a tree that around this part of the world gets very wet feet and often stands at the edge of rivers and lakes in actual open water. Here it was, however, in the heart of Charleston growing practically out of the sidewalk. It was not alone!
For those wondering, the palm is a Cabbage Palm (Sabal Palmetto), which can be found in almost every viewpoint in the city. I think this was taken on Church street, but I am not entirely sure.
Here we have a Live Oak (Quercus Virginiana) forming a rather broad crown with such a tiny base. Granted, the base was filling out its growing space rather impressively.
That adorable little palm growing next to it is a Dwarf Cabbage (Sabal Minor).
Clearly the people of Charleston, even with such limited space, preferred their skyline to be a mixture of artifice and nature. Except for the some of the major streets, it seemed as if every plausible inch of the city was planted and then on a grand scale. I have always noticed this a lot about any urban area in the South older than the past few decades; our winter home in Fort Lauderdale had a backyard featuring two seventy foot tall Royal Palms (Roystonea Regia) and a sixty foot Slash Pine (Pinus Elliottii) graced the neighboring yard. The climate is just going to ensure that a giant scale is the default setting, and the locals don't seem to be too quick to put a stop to growth. This is not to say that the North is lacking in such a mentality, but just that places like Charleston seem to promote a more organic approach to the city landscape. I could probably write loads more on the topic, but I figured I would let the pictures do the talking here.
Your typical southern California beach scene, with a layer of pollution faintly visible on the horizon, overpriced condominiums, expensive parking, and for some reason an agave in full bloom growing wild on the sand.
It seemed like a pleasant picture, so I thought I would use it. The title is the location of the beach. Like many coastal towns, everything is densely packed in and almost no one has a private stretch of ocean front. Most of the small yards get paved over, and those that do not get planted with palm trees, mostly the tall-growing, salt-tolerant Mexican Fan Palm (Washingtonia Robusta).
The neighboring community of Sunset Cliffs features slightly larger yards, some houses even having pools. For the most part, however, things are packed as tight as sardines in a can. Ironically, things here in the seaside high rent district are just as packed here as they are across the border in the slums of Tijuana. In contrast, densely populated seaside Miami and Fort Lauderdale feature your average size yards and free parking lots, despite space also being a premium in a southern Florida that is otherwise largely too wet and spongy to support much in the way of a city.
The median house price in Fort Lauderdale and Miami closer to the ocean and intercoastal waterway is around $250,000 U.S. currency. The median house price in San Diego and affiliated towns such as Ocean Beach is $520,000 and more. Florida, it seems, is the place to get a vacation home, whereas California is the place to live. Both places have pleasant climates, southern Florida being largely tropical and coastal southern California being what can best be described as "eternal spring", never much deviating from 60-70 year round. Both places get tons of sunshine. Florida can present hurricanes, which used to be dealt with by having homes constructed of concrete (it worked). Coastal southern California can present earthquakes and tsunamis. Things in general are far more expensive in California than they are in Florida, and yet still the demand for real estate is so much higher in the land of the easy going sunset. Maybe it is something in the name... people have been attracted to her so strongly for nearly 250 years now. Southern Florida? Maybe for the past 70 years or so, once they started cutting down the mangroves.
I happen to like mangroves. And coconut palms. And fun Caribbean sea shells. Still, that crisp Pacific water does feel pretty amazing, and it has a lack of dangerous jellyfish near the beaches in Cali, along with fun things like kelp and sea lions. To each their own!
The very first post on American Voyages defined North America as everything consisting of continental Canada, the United States, and Mexico, but technically speaking, such limits are not really being fair to what North America really encompasses. In truth, our continental plate extends as far east as half of Iceland and as far west as parts of Russia and Japan. Now of course, a blog about North American geography, history, etc. would be rather silly if I took some time to cover Hokkaido or Siberia, but my recent reading into everything botanical regarding Florida got me thinking about some of our outlying nearby continental islands, namely Cuba and the Bahamas.
Both places have been historically linked to the rest of North America, in some cases in far stronger ways than with the rest of their Caribbean neighbors. Cuba was the departure point of choice of Spanish explorers and colonizers for expeditions into Mexico and Florida, and the island was lusted after for years by the United States during the late nineteenth century. Though the current embargo keeps Cuba at arm's length from the United States, she has decent diplomatic relations with both Canada and Mexico. The Bahamas pretty much experience economic vitality because of trade and tourism links with the United States. Both nations feature a climate and biodiversity remarkably similar to that of southern Florida. I have been fortunate enough to see this up close and personal in the Bahamas, but my only experience thus far of Cuba has been of a few distant glimpses of a mountainous coast from the Straits of Florida. There are no reasons why we can't occasionally talk about her though, especially since I have some rather controversial posts about language coming up this week. You know, posts about, gasp, that dreaded Spanish language everyone here seems to be afraid of.
Oh, and for those of us wondering, this would be where North America technically ends down south:
Thanks USGS! This map and all sorts of fun stuff can be found here.
With the exception of historical photos, data maps, and otherwise very impressive photographs and videos, I have wanted to display only pictures that I have taken. This is not so that I may show off my amateur photographic skills, which a professional photographer friend have said are lacking, but so that I may present things from experience and a personal perspective. Pictures are wonderful things, but as I have stressed so many times before, they don't complete the story. That said, I have not been to certain parts of the continent in a while, meaning I don't have a lot of pictures around. At the same time, even a picture backing up descriptions of sensible experiences is still just a description. Let's face it, the time has come to move around a bit a more here, and so from here on out, I will be making use of images gathered from around the internet (so long as I have some sort of a sensible connection to them). When they are not my own photographs, I will include their source in every caption. This will also be a great way to explore "off the beaten path" from more than just the blog.
So, that in mind, let's head to the Florida that exists beyond the tourist hot spots and postcard perfect beaches. Why? Because when I was browsing some nature books last night, time and again, I came across a refusal to document anything from southern Florida (and Mexico) because it feels too much like a copy of the Caribbean islands. If you ask me, I think they were just afraid of the production costs of adding in a bunch of more pages to make their guides exhaustive, but here we are. Southern Florida is a very unique place on this globe, deserving of far more recognition than to be dismissed as "part of something else". True, it does have some botanical and animal species that are also found in Cuba, the Bahamas, and southwards, and it also has some species that extend their range slightly into the tropical realm from as far north as Quebec, like the Red Maple (Acer Rubrum). Raccoons (Procyon Lotor) live alongside American Flamingos (Phoenicopterus Ruber). More unique and becoming increasingly rare is this scene below:
Here we have a wild Florida Royal Palm (Roystonea Regia) growing in a hammock among the Bald Cypress trees, which are noticeably bald during the winter, even though it is commonly in the mid seventies or warmer even in the depth of January. Deciduous trees do still lose their leaves here, though sometimes the change of brilliant color to bare branches back to spring flowers and leaves only takes a matter of weeks, if even that long. For the most part, the casual visitor to southern Florida will not even notice this subtle transformation of a pretend winter, as the wild areas that do remain are full of enough broad-leaved evergreens and pines that the northern species do not make much of an impression. There are native mahogany trees here, as well as the Gumbo-Limbo (Bursera Simaruba), three kinds of mangroves, and 13 native species of palms!
The parts that are not wild, well, they are packed so full of exotics and invasives from the tropics around the world that one would be hard pressed to find something genuinely southern Florida. This happens to be the case because it is the one place in the United States where tropicals can safely be grown, and in the fine American tradition of planting one's property with perceived beauty over native species, there are manicured lawns everywhere along the suburban streets of Miami and Fort Lauderdale that boast just about every kind of flowering tree and palm you can imagine. I would know, because when I was growing up, it was the first place and time where I realized that many of the trees around me were not there when things were wild and untamed. I was six years old and had just taken an interest in both reading in English and noticing that the trees in our Fort Lauderdale backyard were very different from the trees in our Milton, Ontario backyard. Of course, at that time, even while I wondered what "forest Florida" looked like as opposed to city Florida, I also delighted in the sheer beauty of all the tropical flowers, trees, and even lizards around me, native or not. I did not care that everything was here artificially and introduced, and especially did not mind that we were even in the actual tropics.
That's right! Southern Florida does indeed have a tropical climate, but even Key West lies 40 miles north of the Tropic of Cancer. This is because the land is surrounded by water, and very warm water at that. This is the birthplace of the Gulf Stream, which also (usually) makes Europe's winters much warmer despite being as far north as much of Canada. Artificial climates and plants aside though, nothing can really take away from how exotic this land is, both its manicured Miami environs and its primordial but vanishing Everglades wilderness. The contrast is very noticeable:
Much of the densely, yet comfortably, packed urban areas are built on the only true solid ground in the land, a ridge of limestone which rises only 10 feet or so above the surrounding ocean and everglades, with 24 feet marking the highest point in Coconut Grove, a Miami neighborhood which has retained much of its hammock character of dense mahogany and Gumbo Limbo groves towered over by pines, palms, and the odd high-ground Bald Cypress. Still, Coconut Grove is but a remnant, and a very incomplete remnant, of what the Miami rocklands once looked like, which was mostly dominated by southern pines. Development aside, the absence of regular fires in the landscape has altered what remains of the vanished pine rocklands even more. Below is a sample video of some of what remains of this ecosystem and the role of fire in maintaining it, presented by Everglades National Park, which gives you a pretty good idea of what Miami looked like before it was Miami:
This is also a good video for illustrating the role of fires even in a wet and humid place like this.
Outside of the developed areas are vast open prairie-like stretches of sawgrass interspersed with other hammocks; in essence, a very wide, very slow river that drains much of what is green on the map there. Much more can be said about this unique extra-tropical tropical land, but hopefully this post has served as a nice introduction to one of the extremities of the continent, which we will be revisiting a lot in the future.
