Getting to Know Our Local Plants’ Origins

Vero Beach Magazine’s September theme is travel, this being a popular month for off-season journeys, especially to foreign destinations that promise to be less crowded when students are back in school and their parents back to work. A team player, I decided I would also write about travel, although with a slight difference in who or what does the traveling. From everything I have read or seen, the most frequent and constant travelers have not been people but plants, which may be considered the ultimate in pioneering organisms.

Plants began wriggling their way out of the ancient nucleic sea from which we all began and colonizing land about 450 million years ago, an effort made easy when the Atlantic
was just a strait that ran through the mega-continent of Gondwana. Long before the advent of agriculture, when villagers first began to notice wild grasses growing among their rubbish heaps and realized that they sprang from seeds, plants have been on the move.

There is no territorial environment in which plants are not able to take root, from polar ice caps with their hair grass and pearlwort to deserts choked with heat and dotted with prickly pears, from the deepest oceans with red algae seaweed to the highest mountaintops sprinkled with dwarf willow and alpine aster. Plants have the capacity to cover in a short time all kinds of terrain, their means of transportation being traders, botanists, and hunters to carry them, and wind, water, animals, and birds to carry their seeds. The first Europeans to penetrate America’s interior were not seeking passages to the West; they were looking for plants to bring safely back to European nurseries for propagation.

Plants are not only adventurous, but, like squatters, they can be stubborn. Thirty years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster laid a region waste, after all humans had long since been evacuated, poplars sprang up on rooftops and birch trees on terraces, asphalt was split open by shrubs, and roadways were transformed into rivers of green.

Florida’s salutary climate makes it a particularly popular destination for plants. The kudzu, for example—a creeping, climbing vine with grape-scented blossoms, native to Asia and introduced into the South for erosion control—has made its way to Florida, growing a foot a day, climbing telephone poles, laying a carpet that smothers native grasses, plants, and trees.

While the kudzu is out in the open, other plants are more covert, such as the ghost orchid, which has found its way deep into the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, part of the sprawling Everglades ecosystem, the largest state park in Florida, one of its most beautiful swamps, and once a logging camp. Today, its royal palms tower over cypresses with buttressed bases, while ferns as tall as a person cover the forest floor.

Although several endangered Florida panthers call the Fakahatchee home, the swamp is best known for its orchids, especially its rare native ghost orchid, tucked away in the wettest part of the preserve, where spotting it requires wading through waist-high water dark with tannins. The ghost orchid blooms only in summer, typically in August, the hottest and most mosquito-ridden part of the year. Like all orchids, it is one of the most ancient floral species, a descendant of orchids that survived the period of dinosaur extinction.

Orchid enthusiasts come from all over the world hoping to catch a glimpse of the rare, delicate, milky-white ghost orchid, which appears to be suspended in midair, an environment from which its roots get everything it needs to survive. A very few have tried to abduct it—hence the push to list the plant as an endangered species. It is not just poachers that environmentalists worry about. A single hurricane can wipe out scores of orchids. In addition, there is the concern that rising seas might introduce a harmful incursion of salt water.

As beautiful as the ghost orchid but considerably more trouble is the water hyacinth, which, despite its delicate lavender blossoms, is listed among the world’s 100 worst invasive species by the Invasive Species Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. With origins in the Amazon, the water hyacinth may have been introduced into Florida after the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair, where the Japanese contingent reportedly gave the plants away as favors. A Mrs. Fuller, a visitor to the fair who lived on the edge of the St. Johns River, planted it in her fish pond, then dumped the rapidly growing excess into the river.

Capable of floating because of bulbous, air-filled stems, the plant doubled its number every 12 days and made a rapid dispersal through Florida’s waterways. Its dense mats stopped boat traffic, uprooted wooden piers and bridges, killed fish, clogged locks and spillways, and degraded water quality. By 1899, the main waterways of Florida had 12 pounds of water hyacinth per square foot.

The attack was on. Dredges and harvester conveyors removed thousands of tons of the plants. When that didn’t do the job, aquatic herbicides were introduced. Someone suggested importing hippo-potami to Florida to eat up the plants, but the bill before the U.S. Congress to do so was voted down, possibly because someone else pointed out that Florida had manatees that could just as easily do the job. Today the water hyacinth is under watchful control. It’s still there, but everyone has an eye on it, and on the manatees that, it is hoped, will not only continue munching on the plant but will eat a little faster.

The tall, gracefully curving coconut palm is an icon of Florida, its silhouette against a vibrant sunset a prominent feature of the state and a quintessential image. Unlike the ubiquitous sabal palmetto or cabbage palm, however, the coconut palm is not native to Florida. It is believed indigenous to the Malay Archipelago, although Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who sailed the Humboldt Current in a primitive craft (Kon-Tiki), believed that the coconut palm originated in South America and then was carried to Polynesia by South American colonists.

Whatever its origins, the coconut palm traveled oceans to get to Florida, its fruit, the spherical coconut surrounded by a thick, fibrous husk floating long distances and still germinating after being washed ashore.

Accounts of early settlers to Palm Beach, first called Lake Worth Country after General William J. Worth, who fought in the Second Seminole War, all agree that the city got its name from a shipwreck of 20,000 coconuts. Apparently, a 175-ton brigantine named the Providencia, bound for Spain, ran aground east of what is now Mar-a-Lago. The coconuts were taken as salvage and sold for two and a half cents each, then planted. Within a decade, the barrier island was thick with coconut palms, hence the name “Palm Beach.”

Another Florida icon, the orange, is also not native to Florida, although its image is emblazoned on license plates and it is the official state fruit and flower. Native to China and the Malay Peninsula and carried over the centuries by traders, first to Japan and the South Pacific, then to the Middle East and Africa, the orange tree was eventually introduced into Florida by Spanish conquistador Ponce de Leon. Orange trees from Ponce’s seeds were recorded growing in St. Augustine in 1579, although most were uprooted soon after during British privateer Sir Francis Drake’s plunder of the city in 1586.

The remaining orange trees, many growing wild, were planted only as ornamental shrubs because of their bitter fruit until the 1830s, when buds from sweet oranges were grafted onto the hardier root stock and orange cultivation began. Commercial production in the state took off in earnest after the Civil War when Florida’s new railroads allowed growers to ship their produce across the country. By the 20th century, Florida became the top producer of citrus in the nation.

In the past decades, the labor-intensive industry in which fruit has to be handpicked has suffered numerous setbacks, including freezes, hurricanes, infestations of fruit flies, and other blights such as citrus canker and greening disease, a bacterial infection borne by insects. Today, while Florida’s citrus production is no longer what it once was, the surviving groves supply the state’s orange juice industry, a staple of Florida’s economy.

In the spring, whenever I wander the back roads of my community, which was once a grove, I can still catch the aroma of citrus blossom from some gnarled and weathered stumps. Whenever I do, I am reminded of Walt Whitman’s poem titled Orange Buds by Mail from Florida, which tells of “their sweetness through my room unfolding.”