Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Back in the dark ages - before television, air conditioning, DDT, the endangered species list, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Protection Commission and the term “wetlands” - you will probably not be surprised to learn there were developers in Florida.

While some of those developers focused on the Tampa Bay area, others made their way to Miami. Eventually, a few looked west and discovered the Everglades - the once vast and pristine natural wonder that Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote about in her epic 1947 book, “The Everglades: River of Grass.”

When they spotted all that vacant land, the developers said: “Oh, boy!”

Or something like that.

There was one tiny problem, however. The River of Grass was full of water - fresh water flowing from the central part of the state and emptying into Florida Bay. All that water would certainly swamp efforts to pave it over. These guys weren’t giving up, however.

“I know,” said one. “We’ll plant Austrailian Melaleuca trees. Those babies will suck the water right out of that muck so we can put the land to ‘good’ use; we’ll be able to build houses all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.” And so it came to pass.

Punk trees began to attack the Everglades. Pretty soon, the entire state, or so it seemed, was full of punk trees.

To be fair, no one knew back then that the state had been “punked” by punk trees.
They and their nasty cousin, the Brazilian pepper, came to be commonly used as landscape plants everywhere in the state. My father, like many of our neighbors, loved them. Both invasive specie grew quickly and provided some shade. They were cheap, too.

Plus, the birds particularly loved those red pepper berries and spread the plants far and wide. Pinellas County has been trying to get rid of the Brazilian peppers on Weedon Island Nature Preserve for years.

My father was so enamored of the punk trees that he planted a line of them - about 30 - on three sides of our home in the Disston area of St. Petersburg. He spent the last 10 years of his life cutting them down, one by one, by hand. He said it was good exercise.

Only too late had he - and everyone else - come to realize exactly why the trees were imported. Punk tree roots head for water with the same gusto as Harry Potter spoilers jumped to reveal the ending of the seven-book series before the final book was even released last weekend. Pretty soon, those punk roots clogged city sewer pipes, city water pipes, the lines from those pipes to homes, septic tanks, wells. You name it. The damage they and other exotic plants and animals have done to the Everglades and other areas is significant.

There is a point to all of this besides a primer on exotic and invasive species.

I spotted an Associated Press story in the St. Petersburg Times Monday and a brief in the business section of The Tampa Tribune Tuesday that says that a new controversy is brewing: environmental groups opposed to cypress mulch are involved in a national ad campaign that asks consumers not to buy cypress mulch and they are criticizing the retailers who sell it.

Some gardeners are choosing a perhaps more environmentally healthy alternative, says an extension agent in Brevard County: mulch from invasive species such as melaleuca and Australian pine, yet another of the baddies imported from somewhere else.

The logging industry doesn’t agree that cypress mulch is a waste of native cypress trees, arguing that only the tops of already harvested cypress is used in the mulch.

My point here isn’t to start an argument over who’s right, although I suspect I know.

I’m siding with the environmentalists.

To that end, I want to know where to find mulch made out of invasive species. I’ve called around and can’t find it. Does anyone know?

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