TRANSACTIONS OF WAGNER 
Ber VEGETATION OF SOUTH FLORIDA 
distant. The section which the road makes through the hammock affords 
unusual advantages to the botanist to study the layers of the forest, the heights 
of the trees, and their distribution as to light relationship. It also enables one 
to get vistas of the vegetation and good photographs of individual trees, or 
associations (Plate V, Fig. 2). The hammock vegetation belongs to the sub- 
tropic rain forest formation of Schimper.* Everything is new and bewildering 
to the northern botanist who visits a hammock of this kind for the first time. 
Two familiar trees, however, form important elements of the dominant growth, 
where the crown of the trees help to form the canopy above. They are the 
palmetto, Sabal palmetto (Walt.) R. & S., with tall and columnar stem, their 
bases covered with a gray moss, Octoblepharum albidum Hedw., and the live- 
oak, Quercus virginiana L. The palmetto tree was found in young growth in 
the forest and its leaves contribute materially to the forest litter. Occasionally 
among its leaf stalks grows a fern, Phlebodium aureum (L.) К. Br. The live-oak 
is a tree which forms a conspicuous part of the hammock vegetation. It 
branches freely and its large limbs bend into positions favorable for the most 
advantageous light exposure of the foliage (Plate V, Fig. 2). Its trunk and 
branches are loaded with epiphytes, which include the Florida-moss, Tilland- 
sia usneoides (L.) Raf., that grows in festoons, two bird’s nest bromeliads, 
Tillandsia valenzuelana A. Rich, Tillandsia utriculata L. and two orchids, 
Beadlea cranichoides (Griseb.) Small, and Epidendrum (Encyclia) tampense 
(Lindl.) Small. The live-oaks are frequently left when the other trees are 
cleared away, and in a number of places in the original hammock area near 
Miami, their form and load of epiphytes may be studied to advantage. The 
red-mulberry, Morus rubra L., above 20 meters tall, is among the larger trees 
of this forest, as are also the strangling-fig, Ficus aurea Nutt., F. brevifolia 
Nutt., and Coccolobis laurifolia Jacq. The strangling-fig, Ficus aurea Nutt., 
often begins its growth as an epiphyte by fruits carried by birds to the 
limb of some other forest tree. It sends down aérial roots, which grow about 
the trunk of the supporting tree, as they grow toward the soil beneath. 
These roots increase in number until the trunk of the host is surrounded 
and ultimately strangled. The Scotchman, as it is called locally, then entirely 
suppresses the other tree, which decays away within the encircling mass 
of roots, and the fig is left undisputed possessor of the ground and light 
position. Excellent representations of the Florida strangling-fig made from 
* Schimper, A. F. W.: Pflanzengeographie auf physiologischer Grundlage, 500-505. 
