But the island wasn't always this beautiful. When John James Audubon came here in 1832, he describes Key West as being covered with stunted trees, cacti, and vines, tangled together into a scrubby mess. A few years later, the Second Seminole War broke out, and the citizens of the island and the Navy cut down all that scrub. They were afraid the Seminoles would be able to hide in that thick mass and attack the little town. (I personally believe the proprietors of the island wanted to cut it all out to encourage more settlement. It is a fact that the entire island, impenetrable scrub and all, was platted for development in the 1830s--but never mind.)
What this means is that almost nothing growing here is indigenous. Old engravings show coconut palms and there are still a few mangroves on the fringes, but other than that it's hard to say definitively that anything is indigenous. Virtually everything has been brought from somewhere else and planted, which means that the entire island is one big garden.
How anything at all grows here is amazing to me. The soil is only a few inches deep, slowly built up over millennia on coral rock; Key West is an ancient coral reef turned to stone. I have personally seen people planting palm trees by using a jackhammer to create a bowl in the rock. And yet things do grow here, and grow well enough to have to be severely pruned lest they take over entirely.
On the other hand, we don't know what was lost when the settlers and the Navy cut everything down. As far as I know, this is the only key that doesn't have an endangered or protected species on it. I hope I'm wrong about that. But still, was there something precious here that is now gone forever? We will never know.
But there is a lot of beauty here. Tropical and semi-tropical plants thrive in spite of limited water and occasional salt-filled hurricanes. We live with miracles every day.
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