The meaning of 'hammock' — a raised island of hardwood jungle, the rarest and richest of Florida's forests.
The park's named for a hammock, and you may be wondering what that even means — it's got nothing to do with the thing you nap in. In Florida, a hammock is a raised island of dense hardwood forest, standing a little higher and drier than the wet flatwoods and swamps around it. That little bit of extra elevation — sometimes just a foot or two — is everything: it lets the big broadleaf trees take hold, the live oaks and hickories and magnolias, and under them grows a cool, shady, junglelike world of ferns and palms and vines.
Hammocks are the rarest and the richest of Florida's forests, little arks of life, and a virgin one like this — never cleared, never cut — is rarer still, almost gone from the whole state. So as we drive under this green canopy, understand that you're inside one of the last real examples of a whole kind of forest. That's why they moved heaven and earth to save it.
Photo: Ebyabe · CC BY-SA 3.0
