Nurseries in Pahokee and Redlands

I got on the road at four thirty and made it down to the town of Okeechobee by sunrise. It is one of the neatest and cleanest little cities you can imagine, You can sense the prosperity that the surrounding farms and ranches bring. There seems to be a bank on every corner to hold the money. The route I took from Orlando took me down the turnpike past fifty miles of cattle country and woodlands where people come from all over to hunt for deer and wild turkeys. Disembarking at the intersection called Yeehaw Junction took me down a further thirty five miles, which starts as hunting camp land. Just above Okeechobee I passed the six mile long MacArthur Dairy, where tens of thousands of cows produce the leche for Miami's cafe.
I climbed the observation tower at a hotel to take a picture of the north shore of the lake. You have to get up tall to see it, because the whole shore is surrounded by a thirty foot dyke. It's then encircled by a canal with locks that give access every ten miles or so to the lake itself. What an elaborate engineering system. It will take billions to undo it but the benefits to wildlife and natural beauty will be worth it.
As I passed through Pahokee, I was struck by the contrast with its sister town on the other side of the lake. The dilapidated tenements and boarded up buildings provide the perfect stage set for hundreds of actors milling about with their paper bags just revealing a glint of aluminum or glass peeking over the top. Even by third world standards it seems poor.
The first nursery on my trip took my order for five hundred minima jasmine, one hundred twenty purple queen and fifty blue ruellia. I told them I would pick these up on my way back out of town as I headed to Homestead for some big stuff. Two pink tabebuias, a cassia, four eight foot trellised bouganvilla and three multi -trunked robellinis were capped off by a pair of standard "Miami" gardenias(as beautiful as they are fragrant) and two standard double peach hibiscus. The loading crew seemed incredulous that I intended to put all this in my little sixteen foot truck. They didn't know that I was planning on topping it off with a pair of twelve foot Queen crape myrtles and the six hundred seventy one gallon plants I'd already ordered.
Of course no trip to this area would have been complete without a fix of orchids. I stopped at my friends at Banjong whose other nursery is in Thailand. Sometimes when I come here their son and his other Buddhist monk friends are chanting in the avocado grove next to the greenhouses. I managed to limit myself to one blue species rynchostylis. It kept me company in the cab on the way home.