Dogs and Sedges

This plot of land, filled with dog fennel and sedge, sprouting live oak and buttonwood, blooming gaillarda and beach sunflower. This plot of land, worked by the hands of dozens in this community, rag tag as it is. These cabbage palms, the Ludwigia (Ludwigia leptocarpa) growing new leaves out of the top of seemingly dead last year's stalk, capeweed and ground cherry, vines and grasses. This verdant land.

Eucalyptus towering in the background, the anomalous exotic, planted by some other idea before the final plans for the school took shape. These trees that have drawn the most attention this past year, housing three settlements under their branches, notched tree limbs and ridiculous rope contraptions.

This palm hammock, where coyote and marsh rabbit roam, where hand to hand labor exhumes the twisted bodies of root mass and tangled strands of root that gave life to the carpet brush created by Brazilian pepper plants. Where clearings like this one appear where they were theorized not to have a chance.

Theories.

The cause

Gaillardia. Perhaps the most showy of Florida native flowers. These delightful draught tolerant flowers are known locally as 'blanket flowers.' They fill up your flower bed like a thick winter blanket. Their leaves are almost succulent. White hairs seem to reflect the sun's heat. Their very appearance is suggestive of the sun itself. A sunburst.
Gaillardia pulchella, blanket flower, frequenter of sandy spots in the vicinity of the coast. This one erupted on the sandy plain of my restoration project. It got there with my help; I tossed seeds out all fall. But it grew of its own volition, and survives of its own will. There are some who reject this
absence of purity, the hand of man, the hand of me. But when you see these colors, blooming amidst browning sedge seeds and bright green dog fennel, you cannot help but feel a small pang of joy. They seem to float above the succeeding annuals and they seem they want to stay. It hasn't rained here for two months. We need the water from the skies because we have no real soils and our top layer is porous sand. We have drained for two years. Draught. And still these flowers bloom and cover the ground in a thick blanket of leafy, stalky, plant cells. Cooling the ground, drawing water from the most remote and unlikely of earth material. The presence of adaptation. Some things, they say,
stay incessantly the same, while others shift and adjust. Which parts work together how? What ways of seeing are respected and considered? We try to integrate our own best thoughts into something altogether stylish. We wish, sometimes, that things had been easier. All of our efforts seem shamefully short sighted. But when we pause, as I think some of us have paused, when we wait for that moment and rather than force, persuasion. We find something profoundly our own, or somehow deeply everyone's. We realize that we all want to shine, each in our own way. And shine we shall. Bright orange pedal dreams, yellow tipped fantasies, alive in the air where no living thing was given much hope.
Flourishing, where only dreams had reigned.

To talk, anymore, is the worst of fates. Talking has nothing but traps. To hope for a better day, to want to inspire, seems to attract the most loathing of spite. And, yet, talk we must, and hope we do. Another season in the sacred Palm Hammock has come around and life is blooming and buzzing and howling like life wonts to do.