Goddamn swamps are beautiful. The only place I've been to which felt more alive is deep jungle in Panama. Driving to Miami, I stopped in Big Cypress before the Shark Valley area of the Everglades. Whereas the latter is mostly sawgrass marshes with islands of trees that are a few inches higher in elevation, Big Cypress has extensive cypress swamps that took me an hour and a half to drive through. The life there grows in layers and everything has a rich network of epiphytes growing on it. I couldn't ID the specific air plants but they're so large that I think they're the endangered giant ones. Similar species grew over almost every other tree, some of them as massive as witches brooms.
Surprisingly not as many vines as I thought there would be, but the climbing asters that dominated the area were probably 10m long and coming off a bush as large as a car.
I'm definitely going back to Florida to explore its ecosystems more and kayak around the tip. Both carnivorous plants and live fungi were totally absent that far south.
