Five Wild Floridas

As you drive through Myakka, notice that it isn't just one kind of country — it's a patchwork of several wild Floridas laid side by side, and that variety is exactly why so much life lives here. Watch them change past your window.

There's the river and the marsh, the wet heart of it all, where the gators and the wading birds live. There's the oak-palm hammock we drove through, that shady island of live oaks and cabbage palms. There's the pine flatwoods — open stands of tall, skinny pines over a floor of palmetto and wiregrass, the most common old-Florida woodland. And then there's the rarest and most special one of all: the dry prairie. Out in the eastern part of this park stretches one of the largest tracts of dry prairie left on earth — a vast, treeless grassland, flat as a table, that looks like it belongs in the American West, not Florida. It's a globally rare habitat, home to special creatures like the burrowing owl and the sandhill crane, and Myakka protects a great sweep of it. So this one park holds marsh and river, hammock and flatwoods and prairie — five different worlds. Drive slow, watch them change, and you're seeing the whole rich mosaic of wild Florida in a single afternoon. Roll on.