Joan M. Durante Park

This was one of the very first places I visited when I first made my original fact-finding exploratory mission to Interzone way back in March 2008. This week I was pleased to make a slight return to reacquaint myself with its style.

In the early 1990s, the island of Longboat Key found itself stuck with a vast section of land that had formerly held a group of rental cabins but was now a neglected mess. The cabins were abandoned and in disrepair, and the swampy woods were almost completely taken over with invasive species, such as Australian Pine and Brazilian Peppers.

Longboat Key, if you're not aware, is a rather upscale, that is to say, snooty place and of course this eyesore just wouldn't do. Fortunately, in 1994, a private donor named James Durante popped up and offered $750,000 to help develop a park here and restore the property in honor of the memory of his late wife Joan.

And so it was that the Joan M. Durante Park was born. Wetlands were encouraged to form, and wooden walkways were installed over them. The natural flora - Live Oaks, Red Cedar, Sabal Palms, Banyon, Mango, Green Buttonwood, Mahoe, Mangroves, native grasses, etc. - were reinstated. Today it's one of Longboat Key's few great attractions that are free, open to the public and not for private snowbird use only.

They offer maps near the entrance, and I suggest you take one. Like nearby Leffis Key and its labyrinth of wilderness walkways, he park is just big enough to get lost in. Anticipating this (or perhaps in response to lost-visitor incidents), they have callboxes at strategic locations which are direct hotlines to the police.

Longboat Key Beach Rules

You might be allowed to stand quietly doing nothing, but they'll take it on a case-by-case basis.

The Banyan Tree

Since shacking up down here, I've become enamored of those crazy huge trees with a complex web of exposed roots that seem to illogically and impossibly emanate from tree branches, creating Dali-esque crutches and props for them.

They're called Banyan Trees, and they're actually, like lichen, a combination of two different life forms together - the weird extremities are actually what's called Strangler Figs, which are an epiphyte ("air plant") that attaches itself to any given tree and eventually just takes over. I'm perenially interested in life forms like this, such as dodder, Japanese knotweed, bamboo, and the Armillaria fungus.

There are numerous Banyan/Strangler Figs around St. Armand's Key, Siesta Key, Longboat Key, and Sarasota, and I've heard it said that these all spread from thirteen starts that Thomas Edison gifted to John Ringling from Edison's collection on his estate in Ft. Myers. (Newspaper clipping image below from the Lewiston Journal, April 9, 1984.)

Little Blue Heron

Spotted this lovely Little Blue Heron last week while traisping around the southern edge of Longboat Key.