“The Florida scrub was unique…there was perhaps no similar region anywhere…The soil was a tawny sand, from whose parched infertility there reared, indifferent to water, so dense a growth of scrub pine…that the effect of the massed thin trunks was of a limitless, canopied stockade…” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings eloquently describes one of Florida’s most unique habitat types in her novel South Moon Under. Remnants of higher sea levels when these areas were coastal dunes, scrub’s telltale is its sand – white to yellow in color and dry as the beach. These rare and special ecosystems can be dominated by pines or oaks, and have understories of rosemary, saw palmetto, and wiregrass. Alongside gopher tortoises and Indigo snakes, Burrowing Owls and Florida Scrub-jays can be found.
