In De Leon Springs State Park, just north of DeLand, Florida, I walk toward Old Methuselah, an ancient bald cypress. Lush green ferns unfold at its base, and the towering canopy eats up all available sky space, outcompeting the sweet gums and water hickories growing on the edge of the park’s watery bog. The five-hundred-year-old tree is something of an anomaly: Most pines and cypresses—some of them more than a thousand years old—were harvested as part of the region’s logging economy in the early 1900s. There’s a strange, lovely comfort in knowing that in a state the Spanish dubbed La Florida, the flowery one, moss and vines will cover everything that stands still for too long.
Although I am from South Carolina and teach in Georgia now, I’ve had a relationship with Florida and its subtropical environment for more than a decade, when I began retracing the steps of Zora
