My Place on the Gulfshore

Thirty-nine palms," I said proudly. "And that's just in the front yard!" My father had talked about moving to Florida and having a place with a palm tree. He never did.

Perhaps that's why I was describing our new home to my mother with a focus on those palms. Forgive me for my exuberance, but my father was from Indiana, my mother from upstate New York, and I grew up in Iowa. Come to think of it, the rustle of the wind through corn sounds a great deal like the wind in our cabbage palms.

I love cabbage palms-and that's a good thing. In Golden Gate Estates, where I live, cabbage palms dominate much of the landscape. They may seem the most pedestrian of palms, but they're native, tough and useful. Seminoles used their fronds for thatch, their trunks to support chickees, and their growing tips as food-swamp cabbage, they called it. To harvest the tips, they had to kill the palm, but there were so many in those days that the supply must have seemed inexhaustible. Early settlers also used the versatile cabbage palm; and today it is a major landscape plant. It's no wonder that the cabbage palm was selected as Florida's state tree.

The cabbage palms, slash pines and natural diversity of Golden Gate Estates are now valued elements of home for hundreds of families, but this land was considered worthless just 50 years ago. Golden Gates Estates originated as one of those developments of the 1950s-1970s era that have been labeled land scams. Here, as elsewhere in Southwest Florida, swamp land was sold sight unseen as pieces of paradise to speculators and gullible buyers around the world. Now, decades later, huge numbers of lots remain unsold. Part of the area is being rehabilitated to restore the Everglades.

Integral as cabbage palms are to our landscape, some of my neighbors see the tree as scruffy and common. In an attempt to gentrify it, they scrape the trunk clean of its coarse boots. Before I moved to Southwest Florida, I thought of boots as something you put on your feet-as in hiking boots or the rubber boots my grandmother called galoshes. A boot on a cabbage palm is the base of a frond. When a frond dies and falls, the boot often remains behind. The collection of boots on a cabbage palm can extend from the ground up, giving the trunk a rough-patterned surface. Some cabbage palms normally lose their boots; others keep them.

My neighbor may have been trying to beautify his cabbage palms or to reduce the palmetto bug-i.e., cockroach-population. But as a biologist, I believe what my high-school biology teacher wrote on the blackboard the first day of class: "Structure is for function." Surely the boots serve the cabbage palm in some way. With our lengthy dry season, I'm guessing that they may help the palm retain water.

One thing is certain: Cabbage-palm boots provide habitat for dozens of other living things including ferns, mosses, bromeliads, tree frogs, and often nesting birds. A neighbor cleared vines from the trunk of a cabbage palm to expose a beautiful shoestring fern. When I stopped to photograph the fern, he told me he didn't know what it was, but was simply enamored with it.

The cabbage-palm-boot community is a complex microcosm-as is Golden Gate Estates. My neighbors include teachers, an electrician, a construction contractor, a truck driver, small-business owners, salesmen and retirees. Most residents love the seclusion and natural diversity-one has emus from Australia roaming his front yard and parrots in an outdoor aviary-but a few prefer other kinds of wildlife. I'm thinking of the people who seem to have a party every weekend; their music and laughter occasionally drown out the frogs, owls and other night sounds.

And that's just fine with all of us. One of the reasons we chose to live in the Estates is the live-and-let-live atmosphere. If you want a formally landscaped and manicured yard, you can have it. If you want your landscape natural, you can have that, too. We mow our front yard-more or less-and our back yard, much less. Mainly, we tend to mow paths here and there, leading us to the far reaches: the big pine, the fern garden, past the swollen trunks of bald cypress. The paths change as new plants come into bloom and we veer around them, or as we discover a certain tangle where striking exotic plants are suddenly on the verge of taking over. Box turtles creep down our paths to reach fallen grapes and mushrooms. Glass lizards sun in the openings, gliding out of sight as we approach. Gray squirrels compete with birds for feeder privileges, and every once in a while, a Big Cypress fox squirrel scampers by.

The roads in much of the estates are straight and laid out in a grid. No imagination, maybe, but the design does add to the feeling of spaciousness and elbow room we enjoy here. Our road is a mile long-and, like many in the estates, dead-ends at a canal, which also seems part of a grid and straight as an arrow. I love these dead-end roads: with no through traffic, they invite walking, biking and rollerblading.

I'm not much into exercise for the sake of exercise, but if I've got a mission, I can go all day. Shortly after we arrived I discovered a large earleaf acacia next to the road along a power line. The earleaf acacia is from Australia and gets its name not from its leaves, but from its seed pods that, when growing, bear an eerie resemblance to a green ear. The tree is incredibly prolific, with its seeds scattered by birds and other wildlife far and wide. The mother tree near the power line has produced hundreds of young offspring. That spurred me to take walks every day. Every time I passed that tree, I pulled up a seedling. With each, I took satisfaction in the conviction that I was slowing its advance. Sunday mornings when I walked to a nearby store for a newspaper, I often dallied to pull several seedlings. But one Sunday I discovered that someone else had a more effective means of stopping the earleaf acacia. He or she had taken a chainsaw to the mother tree. Now, with no new seeds, I'm running out of seedlings to pull.

The straight streets and canals of the Estates have another virtue: They make you realize that this is big-sky country. Forget those advertisements for that state out West. To me, the words are much more appropriate for Southwest Florida. The sky meets the land at the end of the street and down the canal and mushrooms to incredible heights each summer afternoon. Our big sky is not the static postcard with fixed old mountains in the distance, but a dynamic expanse with billowing clouds that glow in the afternoon sun, darken when pregnant with rain, and stab at the earth with spectacular lightning.

Draw a line from Disney World to Golden Gate Estates and you've drawn a belt across Florida along which thunderstorms occur on an average of 90 days per year-more electrical storms than anywhere else in North America. Why?

As I tell my classes, to get their attention: "Florida sucks." Southwest Florida is at a subtropical latitude, so it gets hot here in summer. Walk barefoot on asphalt or concrete and you'll feel how the land heats up. But we are surrounded by water, precious cooling water. The Gulf of Mexico heats more slowly than the land, and as it heats, surface water evaporates. Over the land, as each day progresses, the air heats and rises. The partial vacuum created by rising hot air literally sucks in moisture-laden air from the Gulf. We call that air being pulled in sea breezes. Over the land, the moisture-laden air also heats and rises. By mid-afternoon, it is rising rapidly, and the friction of water molecule against water molecule generates static electricity, similar to the friction of sliding across a car seat in winter or shuffling across a carpet. But this static electricity is on a grand scale, and the spark that results is one of the most powerful forces in nature: lightning.

The trees that stand in our yard today tell long-ago stories to those who can decipher natural history. The bald cypress trees in our yard were born in the waters of the Big Cypress Swamp, which once covered this land. Scarred pines whisper of long-ago fires, the products of friction generated by land, sea, and sun. The Brazilian pepper from South America, melaleuca from Australia, periwinkle from Africa, and other exotics shout, "My land now!"

As a biologist, I love living in such a diverse and ever-changing environment. Everywhere I look, I see struggles for survival, challenges for the future and a need for understanding the nuances of interactions and interdependence. The longer I live here, the more I hope to understand-and preserve-all the pieces of this living kaleidoscope.