"If a garden is supposed to remove us from ordinary existence, then the wilderness of the Okefenokee Swamp, in Georgia and Florida, accomplishes this separation more surely than any garden I have ever entered.
"Canoeing across the Okefenokee is to travel far back in biologic time to a world of plants and animals that seems disconnected from the known world. The experience of disconnection is deepened because Okefenokee is a blackwater swamp. Tannic acid from the dark peat floor of the swamp makes it so. In its inky water, reflections are almost perfectly mirror-like. Every aquatic plant, every flower, every cypress tree, and the eye of every alligator is doubled."
—From the National Geographic book Seeing Gardens, 2000
Photograph by Sam Abell
|
