Heart of Heartiness
This cabbage palmetto or cabbage-palm (Sabal palmetto) is the only palm species native to the eastern United States. It's range is from the southern coast of North Carolina south along the coast to Florida, a state it occupies the southern three quarters of. South Carolina and Florida both claim it as their official state tree, although the geography favors Florida. Limited by climate and well suited to soils that would not appeal to more discriminating trees, the cabbage-palm is planted in urban places and has been planted in large numbers along Florida's Interstate Highway system. They are something like the sycamore of the south, streetside and poorly nutrified. The cabbage-palm can tolerate soils from base to acidic, and prefers the sandy neutrality of the Southeastern coast and Florida Peninsula. Drought has no immediate effect on the tree, and it will flourish and grow with vigour under regular water. The leaves or fronds, six or seven feet in length and nearly as wide, erupt directly out of the top of the trunk of the tree - a trunk that never branches. Some of these native palms retain their leaves, the stalk of which is sawed off forming alternating pockets along the length of the trunk, pockets that provide home to several kinds of lichen and fungus as well as other native air-breathing plants. You can see a new frond taking shape directly out of the top of the tree in this picture, it's thick spine developed first, sticking almost five feet straight into the air. If I were to climb this tree and root out that frond, the tender living tissue could be made into a delicious salad. Perhaps you've had one: heart of palm? If you root out the living tissue, however, you take the life of the tree. The practice is discourage and outlawed, although gleeners descend with speed upon every palm fallen by natural causes. Hurricane salads, they might be called. The trunks themsleves are usefully solid and used as wharf pilings and for docks. The fronds can be turned into brushes when they are young and woven into baskets as they mature into leaves. This one builds its leaves in a steady native pace. Happy here amongst the citrus trees and pineapple, beach sunflower and green anoles.

This quiet place is an anomaly, though. Today brings scenes from new corners erupting into bloodshed, a war on nothing against nothing and everything perpetrating itself perfectly along these lines. We started it. Not the underlying tensions, but the unfettered expression of violence. We started that. We sanctioned the state expression of that, modeled it for all the world to see. The rudderless cause-mongering of GWB, at it again today and clearly aiming for the lowest denominator. That our outrage hasn't swelled into something more tangible and politically effective may be the great historical question of our age. Surely the cost has become too much for all of us. Surely it was predictably so from the very outset. Surely we cannot wish this for ourselves. The evils unleashed are furious, it seems, but why do we only work to unleash more? What fevered battle plan gives this route any credence or justifications? Do we retreat from our best efforts forever? Have we fallen that far. This Sunday as I float in the warm salty seas of our southern Gulf I think of cabbage palmettos, hedging their bets by keeping their structure simple and their needs flexible. The seed of their future generations falls confident each year, would that the same for ours.