The old-growth live oaks — some a thousand years old — draped in ferns and Spanish moss.
Slow down through here and just look up. These live oaks around you are not ordinary trees. This is virgin hammock — forest that was never cut — and some of these giants have been standing on this spot for close to a thousand years. Think about that: this oak was already old when Columbus sailed, a seedling maybe when the Vikings roamed. Their huge limbs reach out sideways as far as they reach up, so heavy they rest their elbows on the ground, and every inch of them is furred with resurrection ferns and hung with Spanish moss.
There's a famous one in this park often called the oldest — a live oak reckoned to be over a thousand years old. Whole generations of Florida wildlife have lived and died in the shade of these trees. To stand under them is to feel very young and very briefly here, and that's a good and humbling thing. This is what nearly all of Florida's high ground looked like once, before the saws came — and it's why people fought so hard to save this one patch of it.
Photo: Ebyabe · CC BY-SA 3.0
