Admittedly, there are few circumstances in which a swamp buggy feels like the best choice of vehicle, but on this particular excursion to see one of the rarest orchids on the planet, our monster-truck-sized tires seem comically out of place. Trundling along a dusty, double-track road, we pass through open meadows and airy stands of slash pine (Pinus elliottii) and saw palmetto (Serenoa repens). The faint breeze the vehicle stirs up is so hot and dry, I half expect the straw-yellow grasses along our route to burst into flame.
With every few hundred feet of forward progress, though, we drop an imperceptible inch or two in elevation, moving from the relative highlands of the pine flatwoods toward what some here call “the Grand Canyon of the Everglades:” the Fakahatchee Strand. This 38-kilometer-long (24-mile) stretch of densely forested wetland is one of the lowest points in Florida—albeit by only a few feet—and, as a result, carries much of the fresh water that flows in a slow, meandering path from swamps up north to the state’s southern tip. At least it used to.
To its proponents, for whom the word “swamp” is no more a pejorative than forest or meadow, the Fakahatchee Strand is not simply a conduit—or, worse, land that is valuable only if drained and developed. It’s a special place, home not just to panthers and bears and river otters, but also to one of the rarest and most famous plants in the world: the ghost orchid (Dendrophylax lindenii). The Fakahatchee is also largely unknown and underappreciated by people in this state and beyond, says photographer Carlton Ward Jr., 43, an eighth-generation Floridian who has made this trek dozens of times in his efforts to document and share the rich biological diversity here. “This is truly the wild heart of the Everglades,” he says, “as wild and inaccessible as you get in the state of Florida.”
Wild as it may be, the Fakahatchee Strand is an ecosystem with a long history of degradation, and one that faces persistent threats. Several of its native species, including the Florida panther (Puma concolor coryi) and ghost orchid, are endangered and clinging to survival in a tiny fraction of the space they once inhabited—space that’s becoming increasingly cut off from other such remnants
