4 FLORIDA WILD FLOWERS 



difficult miles to find flowers that the tourist today passes 

 by on well-made roads. But Michaux had an advantage 

 the modern traveler sometimes lacks — for he saw the 

 flowers. 



A point of especial interest in the Florida flora is the 

 abundance of those plants that have the extraordinary habit 

 of catching and devouring small insects ; thereby reversing 

 the usual order, since insects only too commonly devour 

 plants. More than twenty species of insect-catching plants 

 are found in Florida. Our butterworts, sundews, bladder- 

 worts, and pitcher-plants are all of them insectivorous, and 

 each of these four groups of plants has its own peculiar 

 way of securing its victims. Brigands and highwaymen 

 of the plant world they are — setting their leaves as traps 

 and spreading them as snares for the unwary, while blos- 

 soming alluringly in purple and gold. 



But botanizing in Florida is not limited to the ground. 

 Air plants and tree orchids make the swamps and ham- 

 mocks of southern Florida hanging gardens of beauty. 

 Fastening their strange growth on the trees, and making 

 use of a special diet of atmospheric dust and air and rain, 

 they produce as brilliantly decked spikes of bloom as any 

 of our earth-growing plants. Even on the straight shafts 

 of cabbage palms they grow, one after another up the 

 trunks, as though climbing to the ferns that make their 

 home in the bases of the leaves above, and many a great 

 live oak bears on its spreading branches luxuriant gardens 

 of epiphytes — ferns, air plants, and orchids. 



The ferns of Florida are no less remarkable than the 

 flowering plants. Several grow as epiphytes : one of these, 

 the grass fern, resembles a grass in its extremely narrow 

 leaves, which hang like tufts of grass from the tree trunks. 

 Another epiphyte, the resurrection fern, has the strange 

 habit of appearing to wither and die during dry weather, 

 but revives in fresh greenness with each rain. The golden 

 polypody grows most frequently directly below the crowns 



