Florida's True Gifts

In a season filled with celebration, an appreciation for wild miracles.

- Tracey Minkin

“My heart swelled with uncontrollable delight”

AS CHRISTMAS MORNING dawns over the long and low-lying blue-green peninsula called Florida, two miracles—one imagined, one real—unfold in the sky. Both of them bestow gifts.

The imagined miracle involves an old man and reindeer that gallop on air. The real one is this: High above a swamp in the western Everglades, anchored to the corded bark of an old-growth bald cypress tree, a ghost orchid draws energy to bloom. With pale petals hovering like spirits above delicate, near-invisible roots, with a beauty so ephemeral that it’s been poached to the edge of existence, Dendrophylax lindenii clings to its host and blooms in the swamp’s musky air. Protected now in Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, the ghost orchid blooms sometimes as early as January, and sometimes with as many as 40 flowers in the course of a year. It’s the largest of its kind ever discovered.

This ghost orchid attracts not only human visitors, who glimpse it from the sanctuary’s boardwalk, but also the only insect on Earth that can pollinate it: the giant sphinx moth. If Cocytius antaeus finds and dusts the ghost orchid while it’s blooming, the plant will drop a pod that offers the hope of progeny. These are long odds. It’s remarkable that there are any ghost orchids left at all.

Call it a gift—a miraculous one—springing from a wild, wet corner of the world that overflows with strange and beautiful abundance. From creatures so small that they remain unseen to vast networks of coral ranging offshore for hundreds of miles, Florida is a parade of nature so varied that cataloging those gifts may best be done from the sky.