Native Landscapes in the Florida Uplands
The last few years of my life I’ve spent thinking about what I truly value and how I want to spend my time on this big blue marble. But before I go into detail about how that plays into my life, I want to talk a little bit about astronauts. Stick with me.
There is this funny thing that happens to many astronauts when they go to space, and it’s called the “overview effect.” At least 20 astronauts have experienced this phenomenon where when they see Earth from space for the first time in all its blue fragility, they are struck by a sense of awe and transcendence and experience a complete perspective shift about our role in this universe. Many come back with a renewed sense of focus about humanitarian causes — and doing whatever they can to preserve and save this place that we live.
The ever-odd actor William Shatner went to space in 2021 and he was especially moved. He wept when he stepped out of the aircraft because of what he called “grief for Earth.” Later, in his biography Boldly Go, he wrote that “The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands …”
When I hear Elon Musk, bless his heart, talk about colonizing Mars I wish him and his supporters lots of luck. Struggling to survive someplace hundreds of times more inhospitable than the Mojave Desert is not my idea of a hopeful future. I am very happy on the spaceship we’re riding on. I can’t imagine going anywhere else. While I’ve never experienced the overview effect, it makes perfect sense to me.
To bring this discussion back to Earth — and more specifically to Florida — I am invested in this place.
After several painful and difficult years full of physical, emotional and psychological struggles I’ve been forced to define, in the simplest terms I could grasp, my values and my beliefs.
How did I want to spend my life and what mattered to me?
I made a brief foray into political activism and found myself disappointed with the results. My professional career in higher education was fulfilling and worthwhile, but I also struggled with the disillusionment that comes with trivial game-playing and incremental progress in a world that appears to devolve in one broad stroke after another. Whiling away my hours in a never ending receiving line of networking events, galas and self-congratulatory get-togethers is something I’d like to do the least amount of I possibly can. We Obama-era millennials had been told, nay, commanded to change the world, but doing so seems more unlikely and isolating with each year — something that’s more an idea than a reality for most people at any given point in history. At its worst this sort of thinking is a form of gaslighting by the wealthy and powerful people who actually could change the world, but have no incentive to do so.
But the one thing that stuck with me more than anything — the one place I wanted to have an impact — was in the soil beneath my feet.
Beneath all the highways, sub developments and strip malls, there is a lost kingdom. A once-real, now-mythic place called Florida. The name literally means The Land of Flowers. It is a place of vulgar abundance, a place of underground springs, plentiful fish, wildflowers, panthers, bears, alligators and pumpkins. There is no place else on Earth — and probably in the universe — that looks like it. On film it is instantly recognizable. There is no other place that blurs the line between land and water — between wild and welcoming — like Florida. It is mostly gone now.
There are a few places here and there where it is still hanging on. You sometimes see a prairie hammock out in the distance as you drive down I-75. Palmetto bushes still have a way of popping up in vacant lots and even from time to time on street medians. There are a few windy rivers left (where they haven’t been straightened into flood control canals by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers). You can still see manatees in Florida’s magical springs. But otherwise, this place, this once-real place that existed 50, 40, even 30 years ago is largely gone. In its place are imported palm trees, tiki bars, Margaritavilles and freedom-loving political partisans drunk-driving their customized golf carts from their condo to the pool, ranting about some politician’s new talking point in between slurps of their Michelob Ultra.
And I’ve made peace with that. If some Ohioan wants to waste away their days trying for a hole in one while blasting Kenny Chesney they have every right to do so. To each his own. But man you should have seen it before.
That is my own overview effect — the Florida overview effect. I saw it like it was and I deeply loved that fragile, green-and-blue place.
It was the ecology I learned about as a kid in 4-H. It was the place where I learned to swim. Where I rode horses. It was and is my happy place. I saw it in the Panhandle and the Keys and in Central Florida and South Florida and at Lake Okeechobee. I saw it. I got to live in it for a while. I realize it’s gone. I realize and accept it will never be like it once was. And so I grieve for it. And I bring it flowers.
I wish you could feel how it felt to be young and barefoot in this humid garden, catching lizards and swimming with the fishes. Nature was and is the ultimate algorithm. I will never get over that feeling and if I catch only a few seconds of it on my deathbed with my eyes turned up to some beige ceiling then every moment of this life between here and there will have been worth it.
I’m lucky enough to own a home in Florida (for the time being). I have a little Florida dirt and mud and grass to call my own. And I am slowly filling that patch with native plants and grasses and trees. I’m not a professional and I still have so much to learn and so much I want to do. But the pursuit brings me joy, gives me purpose and grounds me in a way little else is able to do.
In some ways this is a fool’s errand. You can never go home again. I still have a big yard full of St. Augustine grass and crepe myrtles. But, little by little, I’m replacing these with native trees, native grasses and native plants. I work on it a little at a time every weekend for a few hours.
This hasn’t been easy and I’ve made a lot of mistakes. For one thing, a lot of nurseries and stores sell invasive — yes, invasive — species mislabeled as natives. For another, I knew almost nothing about soil moisture, sunlight and acidity. Learning hardiness zones and what native habitats actually look like and how they function is another challenge. Finding companion plants takes time. And there’s never enough money or manpower. And every hole I dig is full of roots and weeds. As nurturing as this Earth looks from above, it can be a real bear down on the ground.
But I’ve had some wins, too. Tropical sage has done well and I’ve come to appreciate the slow-growing and durable coontie. A trip to Canada opened my eyes to wide-ranging continental staples like black-eyed susans. Ornamental grasses like pink muhly create a soft-rippling border that speaks to my soul. The University of Florida provides a plethora of resources and education. And native nurseries across the state provide both product and inspiration. What’s more, the best of these natives seed themselves. That means within a year you have more plants to divide and spread. Color begets color. Patient work and care is rewarded.
One of the more inspiring connections I’ve made is with a seed seller near Chipley. They live on the same road my grandmother grew up on and can see the old farm she lived on from their house. I’m growing less from seeds these days, but when I do I try to buy from them as much as I can. Across the state, quietly, there are other true believers, planting and praying and remembering. Like monks cataloging and saving old books in the Middle Ages, some of us hold onto hopeless causes because that’s just how we are.
It’s winter right now and it’s been a particularly cold one. As I write this snow is falling in Pensacola and we have had numerous days below freezing here. So I am not planting or pruning the way I will be in just about a month. But every day I go outside and inspect my plants and make my little mental plans. God willing, by this time next year my backyard will be fully transformed. I’ve got some plants to remove and some new ones to plant. I draw the plan in my head every day. At first it seemed like it would take all season, but now it seems more like it will only take two or three weekends at most.
Sometimes it feels a little solitary. Jacksonville is an especially pessimistic place, especially when it comes to geography and horticulture. Its residents, depressed by politics and economics, seem to take little joy in their surroundings. There are few flowers downtown. Most houses have a few boxwoods out front, or as you get closer to the beach, perhaps a tropical plant or two. For all the talk of Southern pride, it rarely seems to extend to the landscape itself. Others, both transplants and natives, pine for someplace else and I understand that, too. But when I drive around in Jacksonville I can't help but imagine what it would look like if we invested more time and energy in the landscape.
Florida — what it was, what it is and what we wish it could be. This is true madness.
In my most grandiose dreams there is a revolution — not a violent, politically-driven one, but an agricultural one (which is political, too, of course). In this grandiose dream sage bushes become chic and cabbage palms replace camphor trees. Little boutiques are filled with refined versions of raw goods — teas from native flowers and honeys from local pollinators. People see what I see in these raw goods — world-class elegance. Something explorers wrote to kings and queens about. Florida’s forgotten fruits become not just desired, but beloved and profitable. I realize this is unlikely, but a fella can dream, can’t he?
There is a special place to me — it’s down a two-lane road near Hawthorne in Alachua County.
It is the home of writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. It is the place where she wrote The Yearling and Cross Creek. The landscape is mysterious and scrubby and peaceful. It is not all native — there are orange trees and other adapted plants and flora — but it is unmistakably that lost Florida. It is still and peaceful there. My own version of that is all I ever wanted in this world. I have a little patch of it now and I will do what I can to make it grow.
Ah, but I am getting maudlin and sentimental here and that is not my aim. What I am trying to tell you is that when I bury my hope in the ground it is not like a funeral, it is like a seed. I plant that hope in this Florida soil — hopefully in the right place — and I tend to it every day until it springs back up with wild and resilient flowers that drop more seeds into the ground — more hope. And I take that hope and I spread it around where it will take root. That is how I want to spend my time here on this Earth. That is my political party and that is my sole plan to change the world.
I am reminded of a quote by Joan Didion that has stuck with me since I read it: “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it the hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” Didion was not one for saccharine observations and for that reason I think she is on to something here. Places get in us as much as we get in them — at least for some of us they do. One remakes the other and vice versa. After the overview — after you take it all in — what else is there to do but come plunging back to Earth, to the very soil from which we came and which we will soon return?
