Everglades National Park itself holds a diverse world of plant life, but when you look at the area covered by the real Everglades, that which encompasses the total natural ecosystem of the area, from Lake Okeechobee down to Florida Bay, you will see even more diversity. When you think of the Florida Everglades, you should imagine more than what’s inside the National Park. Think about the entire lower part of the Florida peninsula, from Lake Okeechobee and the Caloosahatchee River, then towards the south. Much of this has been altered by human construction and drainage efforts, especially around Lake Okeechobee. Water management has always been a crucial issue in southern Florida, and man’s efforts to control the water has devestated much of the plant life, but specimens still remain, surviving in the Park, and throughout southern Florida despite the destruction of much of the habitat. From the river plains of the Caloosahatchee, to Devil’s Garden with its pinelands, to Cypress swamps to the mighty saw grass river, the plant life is diverse, fascinating, and beautiful. We’ll start at the top, in the northern part of this ecosystem, near Okeechobee, and work our way down to the mangroves of Florida Bay.

Plantlife in the Area Below Lake Okeechobee

Jungle Trees

About one hundred and fifty years ago, the region below the watery edge of Lake Okeechobee was a massive, dense jungle filled with trees. The custard apple was especially dense, twisted, thick and gnarly. Difficult to get through, difficult to negotiate, it has rough bark, twisted trunks and gnarly roots, and because it’s rooted in water, the roots arch upwards and create a knotted, dense jungly floor that was very very difficult to navigate, almost impenetrable. There were fruits growing on these custard apples, and the fruits attracted thousands and thousands of birds, whose droppings along with the decayed fruit, created a rich muck that fed the life cycle of the jungle, becoming the foundation for more custard apple in the years to come. THe muck was actaully a type of pete, and was six to eight feet thick. Roots grabbed it, and held on against the flow of water from the gigantic Lake Okeechobee just to the north.

Living in harmony with the custard apple tress, there were knotted vines and slowly moving dark lake water pushing southward toward the Everglades. There were Boston Ferns, and leather ferns, who like spongy areas with lots of water and who can thrive in shady condtions, under the canopy of larger leafy trees.

The Banyan Tree is maybe the most photogenic of trees in this area, and also perhaps the most peculiar. Also known as the Strangler Fig and the Ficus Aurea, this tree lives by strangling other trees. A seed gets dropped between the branches of some other tree by a bird or the wind, and the seed begins to sprout right there, no dirt required. It sends out shoots that eventually reach the ground, taking hold in the dirt around the host tree. More and more shoots begin to cover the host, eventually strangling it. The result, after years of this process, is an amazing array of long straight vertical roots and shoots that looks like nothing else on earth.

Sub Jungle

Below the custard apple jungle, we have an area that’s a little less tropical, but lush and dense enough in its own way! Scrub Willow with cattail-like yellow hanging flowers. These, along with elderberries dominated this area, which brought on the blue jays and the mocking birds and other birds you’ll find all over the place, even up North. There would be crows, grackles, and red-winged blackbirds. The willow and also the elder trees fought hard to win a spot on the harsh rocky terrain, and moon vines hung overhead, creating a spooky, jungly atmosphere. Moon vine is also called Moon Flower, latin name Ipomoea alba. They are climber vines that have tiny white flowers and poisonous seeds, if eaten.

Plantlife in Devil’s Garden

Devil’s Garden is the interior area south of the Caloosahatchee River, which runs east-west between the Gulf coast and Lake Ockeechobee. It’s filled with pines and scrubby brush, of all sorts.

Pines

Pines clung onto rock that stuck out of the much the farthest, at slightly higher elevation than surrounding areas. These higher patches were dryer, and could therefore support coniferous life. There were miles and miles of pinelands, with reddish brown bark and tall tall tops. There were common yellow pine, but mostly there was what is called Caribblean Pine, also called slash pine. It’s actually from the Caribbean islands, blown here by hurricanes. Growing here in the Florida Everglades, it came to be called Dade County Pine. The trunks are thick, and the bark is also thick and layered. The layering of the bark, along with its thickness, means it is fire-resistant, which is a wondreful adaptation to have if you’re a tree in the Florida Everglades. Whereever you have a dry patch of rock in Devil’s Garden, and also further south into the Everglades proper, you’ll more than likely see some slash pine, holding on to its island of life.

Under the slash pine you have palmettos, whose spiky fan-like leaves cover the ground below. The slash pine and the palmetto live in a yin-yang co-existence, one tall and reaching, the other low and broad. There were wildflowers galore, wild poinsettias, blue chicory, amongst the blue-green palmettos.

Hardwood trees also existed, clinging to higher, dry patches in the Everglades just as the slash pine do. Oak trees formed hammocks on the edges of rivers or on these dry everglades patches, bulding roots in the muck, the roots holding onto more muck, slowly building up the island hammock year after year.

Plantlife in Cypress National Preserve

Cypress Swamps

In the wintertime, the little rain that there is doesn’t or didn’t run off the large swath of land just below the slash pine areas of Devil’s Garden, but just above the sawgrass-dominated Everglades. The standing water created swamps, in which cypress trees thrive. We have preserved lots of this swamp area, and it’s now part of Big Cypress National Preserve, or Big Cypress Swamp. Cypress grew up all over the western edge of the giant, wide saw-grass river that we call the Everglades. There were both river cypress and pond cypress. It’s in this area that we have some of Florida’s most famous, unusual, and endangered species of animals as well.

The Bald Cypress tree is a deciduous tree with needles for leaves. Sometimes there is moss hanging from its branches. The base of the tree is much much wider than the trunk, as it grows out of the swamp water. They have what we call knees, which are really roots, which curl and twist out of the water for aeration. The tree can grow to be up to 125 feet tall. Unfortunately, their immense height made them attractive lumber tress for settlers from the late 1800′s and early 1900′s.

Plantlife in the Everglades

Sawgrass

Sawgrass is simple, ancient, and harsh. It dates back four thousand years and hasn’t really changed over that time, as it survives some of the harshest terrain with its simple rough design and tough exterior. Sawgrass feeds itself and no other living form of life. Saw grass sustains nothing, gives no life to anything else, has no symbiotic relationships. Sawgrass lives on rock, which does more to support the community than the sawgrass. The porous limestone rock supports all sorts of life, harboring creatures in its nooks and crannies. Sawgrass clings to the rock and supports its own ecosystem, by rooting itself in its forebears, the decaying muck of older sawgrass which forms a thin layer over the rock…actually thick in some places…as much as eight feet.

Saw grass leaves are spiky and rough-edged, and they cut the skin of humans who try to push their way into the Everglades. There are miles and miles of saw grass out there even today. Before the area was settled, it seemed that the saw grass went on forever. It was reported that the saw grass fields were so vast and flat that you could see the curve of the earth if you looked at the horizon. Maybe you still can. Sixty miles of saw grass. Animals get nothing from saw grass. If you see birds or animals, they are there not for the saw grass but for hammocks on dry islands in the Everglades, where small sub-ecosystems have sprung up around oaks or willows. Yet, saw grass is the basis of life in the Everglades, forming the muck on which the islands form, on which the hammocks begin to grow, to which the birds flock, dropping seeds from other areas, and on which the birds build nests, to which larger animals are attracted. It all begins with the saw grass. Saw grass makes it possible.

Cabbage Palm

The Cabbage Palm, otherwise known as the Sabal Palmetto, grows along the banks of river areas through the Everglades, bordering salt marshes, amongst pinelands, making their own hammocks. They have gray-green fans and dark berries. They succomb to strangler figs, but others like them continue on and create dense hammocks in the river of saw-grass.

The Rock is Rising

The limestone rock that forms the foundation of Southern Florida’s geologic structure begins to rise out of the swamps as you go south into the Everglades, and toward the water’s edge in Florida Bay. As the rock rises, the saw-grass muck gets thinner and thinner, and is therefore less and less able to support trees and even saw grass as you go along. Here’s where the Mangroves start to dig in. There are three types of mangrove in the area. The Red Mangrove, the White Mangrove and the Black Mangrove are all mangroves, but each is only distantly related to the others. Together, they form the largest mangrove forest in the western hemisphere, and of course we think the most beautiful! The White Mangroves are also called buttonwood, and they are the first mangrove species to appear as you move south through the sawgrass. After the buttonwood you ahve the black mangrove, then at last the red mangroves, or Rhizophora. The red mangrove forests are huge, with twisted large trunks, and sometimes as tall as 70 feet, creating a canopy forest situation. Their plentiful leaves grow and die and fall back into the water and form nutrient-rick muck under the water, onto which new mangroves will cling and prosper. Their seeds are long, maybe 6 or 7 inches long, and they float in the water, drifting until they find a shallow spot to take hold and start a new mangrove plant. Sometimes these torpedo-like seed float far far away, as far as the South Pacific. Certainly if you’ve ever been out in a boat in Florida Bay or on the ocean side in the Keys, you have seen the seeds bobbing their way to new homes.

And after the mangroves, you are at the end of the Florida Everglades. The mangrove forests mark the edge of the land, and the beginning of Florida Bay, and further out, the ocean, whose salt water continuously feeds back and forth with the tides, integrating land with water in the Everglades.