The Big Scrub

The Big Scrub is the sand pine scrub at the heart of the Ocala National Forest, the largest expanse of this kind of habitat in the world. It grows on deep, dry, nearly white sand, the remains of old dunes and shorelines left by higher seas, and the plants that live on it are short, tough and fire-adapted: sand pine, scrub oaks, rosemary and saw palmetto. The Florida scrub-jay, a bird found nowhere but Florida, depends on it. Ocala National Forest was established in 1908, making it one of the oldest national forests east of the Mississippi and the southernmost national forest in the continental United States. Sand pine drops its seeds after fire, and for centuries the scrub renewed itself in intense burns that swept across it every few decades. Foresters now clear-cut and reseed it in patches to imitate that cycle. Pat's Island is not surrounded by water. It is an island of longleaf pine rising out of the scrub, and families homesteaded there in the 1800s. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who lived at Cross Creek, stayed with Calvin and Mary Long on Pat's Island in 1933 and used Pat's Island as the setting of The Yearling, her 1938 novel about a boy and his pet fawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize. The Yearling Trail leads to the old homestead sites, where a cistern, a cattle dip vat and the Long family cemetery remain. The scrub also holds dozens of lakes and several clear springs, among them Juniper, Alexander and Salt springs.