ABSTRACT
When I first arrived in Florida from the midwestern city of St. Louis, Missouri, I had read about “driftwood” and seen it for sale in shops. Those gnarled pieces of wood sold for high prices in the Midwest, and it had been something of a mystery to me where the wood originated. Not long after arriving in the state, I made a pilgrimage to the Florida Keys, where the answer to that old mystery was revealed. In several places along the road south, there were shops with stacks of “driftwood.” I even found men in pickup trucks harvesting the wood from the edges of mangroves-driftwood and buttonwood were the same Conocarpus erectus. On one occasion, my class and I helped a man extract his truck from the mangrove mud where he had been stuck for some hours. The bed of his truck was loaded with several hundred pounds of buttonwood root systems and stumps. We never learned exactly what the harvesters were paid for the products, but it was markedly less than the selling price in St. Louis.
