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With school out and the days long, summer can be the best time to get a good dose of Vitamin N (for nature) in Miami.
But where are the wild things anymore?
Actually, they can be found hiding in plain sight among the concrete and asphalt of the city.
A few blocks from the new Brickell City Centre and its “climate ribbon” (engineered to collect rainfall for green roofs) is historic Simpson Park Hammock, a sliver of real woods. This forest was saved more than a century ago from the ravages of early settlers, who had rapidly begun chopping down Miami’s tropical hammock.
The hammock, just off S. Miami Avenue at 5 SW 17th Rd., was dedicated in 1914 as Jungle Park and improved over the years with a pond, a perimeter fence of native oolitic limestone, and a community building and garden center.
Unfortunately, few today know this urban forest exists, let alone venture inside. Even the lone park attendant seemed bewildered when I asked for a trail guide on a recent visit.
“We don’t have that many visitors,” he said.
“What about tourists or schoolkids?” I asked.
“Not really. Kids don’t know what to do,” he said. “Mostly there’s bugs, and sometimes a fox.”
Oh, but there is much to do. And see and feel and hear. The trees here don’t line up between parking spaces; they live in a community. Simpson Park’s eight acres of magnificent native trees -- robust gumbo limbos and multi-limbed strangler figs -- are descendants of a coastal hammock that stretched along Biscayne Bay from the Miami River to Coconut Grove, and west to the Everglades.
What has survived under the high-rises is rare habitat that provides shelter and food for insects like the native black swallowtail butterfly, migrating birds, and other animals -- including that Brickell fox.
You can see the faint outlines of condos and bank buildings through the tree canopy, and every so often the air carries in the murmur of a Metrorail train. Still, the dense forest brings you back to a primeval Miami. It even smells different.
Amid the crazy intensity of the city, this hammock quiets the mind. The dark forest of twisted and gnarled limbs envelops and shelters you. Here you can wander and never feel lost.
Charles Torrey Simpson, the Florida naturalist and author for whom the park is named, wanted others to find the magic and wisdom of the trees: “Year in and year out its greenery, its peace and quiet have appealed to me and from it I have learned some of the most valuable lessons of my life,” he wrote of the hammock on his land.
In Coconut Grove, Commodore Ralph Munroe considered the native hammock the “legitimate occupant of the land.” Although the native forest was condemned by early settlers eager to plant crops and fruit trees, Munroe understood the hammock’s intrinsic and spiritual value. And fiercely protected it.
Today his slice of the great hammock is found at the Barnacle Historic State Park, his former estate on Biscayne Bay. The other remnant is in Alice Wainwright Park, also in Coconut Grove.
The gifts of nature are many, says author Richard Louv in his book The Last Child in the Woods, in which he calls for children to return to learn in green and wild places.
Learning to be in nature means learning to be patient, to calm down, to use your five senses to get to know the world around you -- essential skills, Louv insists, if we’re to cure our “nature-deficit disorder.” And go on to save the world, too.
Mark Walters, chair of the Sierra Club’s Florida chapter, has been taking children into nature for 20 years as the volunteer with the Miami group’s Inspiring Connections Outdoors (ICO) program, formerly known as Inner City Outings.
The children who started out kayaking and camping with ICO in the urban woods and waterways of Virginia Key are now college graduates who still feel a deep connection to nature, and continue to advocate for its preservation.
“Nature helps kids recognize that their love of being outdoors comes with the responsibility not to trash it,” says Walters.
Starting at an early age also helps children relate to nature in a way that book learning can’t. “It turns from the abstract to the concrete,” adds Walters. “It’s a tangible experience where they can see the interplay of species within a living ecosystem.”
And it’s never too late to start. “The connection to nature is innate,” he explains. “We all have a real need to connect with nature, even if we’ve been deprived all our life.”
Of course, if there are no natural areas left, whether in the city or the wilderness of a state park, we can’t make that connection. “If there’s nothing to get back to,” warns Walters, “then everyone’s lost.”
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