My Florida is the inundated prairie dotted by lonesome cabbage palm hammocks, cypress islands and bayheads, with an undulating flock of egrets like galloping white horses in the distance.
My Florida is the pine, palmetto and wire grass woods, where the bees go from the penny-royal to the wild honeysuckle and the placid gopher tortoise walks on its stubby legs, stretching out time.
My Florida is the little spruce trees on the white sugar of rolling dunes, leaning the way the wind has blown them, with the gray lichens below and the nests if flying squirrels in their branches. It is scrub-oaks covered with orange love-vines and a saucy towhee scratching. It is not a well-manicured lawn joining on to the lawn of a neighbor, and then more lawns joining lawns, all neat and orderly and characterless.
My Florida is the winding tropical river, heavy with the musky scent of palm blossoms, with water turkeys sunning themselves, striped necked turtles plopping from logs, grey squirrels barking and the rat-tat-tat of the pileated woodpecker resounding. It is not a CBS [concrete-block-stucco], all electric ... home.
My Florida is the tarpon rolling, the mullet leaping for fun, pelicans diving, red-beaked water skimmer gulls skimming the surface with their bills, a manatee blowing, an eagle stealing fish from an osprey high in the air. It is not a four-lane highway.
My Florida is the strangling fig tree swallowing a palm, shoestring ferns in the hammock's shade, wild orchids, Spanish moss and crimson-flowered airplants. It is not a Washingtonia palm tree in a parking planting, or a hibiscus bush.
My Florida is squatty custard apple trees and moon vines-and "watch out for that moccasin!" .. It is not pink-kneed vacationers in sun glasses and Bermuda shorts.
My Florida is going fast.
1. Total area | 58,560 square miles (22nd) |
2. Length (N to S) | 447 miles |
3. Width (E to W) | 361 miles |
4. Highest point | 345 feet near Lakewood in Walton County |
5. Coastline | 1,197 statute miles |
6. Shoreline | 2,276 statute miles |
7. Longest River | St. Johns 273 miles |
8. Largest lake | Lake Okeechobee 700 square miles |
9. Largest County (land + water) | Palm Beach 2,578 square miles |
10. Largest County (land only) | Collier 1,994 square miles |
11. Population 1997 | 14,500,000 (12,937,926 in 1990), 4th in the Nation |
12. Population 1980 | 9,739,992 |
13. Population growth | (1980-1990): 32.83% |
1. Nickname | The Sunshine State |
2. Bird | Mockingbird |
3. State Flower | Orange Blossom |
4. Tree | Sabal Palm |
5. Freshwater Fish | Largemouth Bass |
6. Saltwater Fish | Atlantic Sailfish |
7. Marine mammal | West Indian Manatee |
8. Saltwater mammal | Bottlenose dolphin |
9. Animal | Florida Panther |
10. Shell | Horse conch |
11. Soil | Myakka fine sand |
12. Beverage | Orange juice |
13. Butterfly | Zebra longwing |
14. State Wildflower | Coreopsis (tickseed) |