Goddamn swamps are beautiful. The only place I've been to which felt more alive is deep jungle in Panama. Driving to Miami, I stopped in Big Cypress before the Shark Valley area of the Everglades. Whereas the latter is mostly sawgrass marshes with islands of trees that are a few inches higher in elevation, Big Cypress has extensive cypress swamps that took me an hour and a half to drive through. The life there grows in layers and everything has a rich network of epiphytes growing on it. I couldn't ID the specific air plants but they're so large that I think they're the endangered giant ones. Similar species grew over almost every other tree, some of them as massive as witches brooms.
Surprisingly not as many vines as I thought there would be, but the climbing asters that dominated the area were probably 10m long and coming off a bush as large as a car.
I'm definitely going back to Florida to explore its ecosystems more and kayak around the tip. Both carnivorous plants and live fungi were totally absent that far south.
This is so cool