Loxahatchee NWR cypress swamp
— the green that holds the water still.
Not only on a wall.
Loxahatchee NWR cypress swamp, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The cypress swamp at the north end of Loxahatchee. A 0.4-mile boardwalk loops out from the Visitor Center through pond apple and bald cypress draped in Spanish moss, the water beneath it dark and almost without current. Wood storks work the shallows. The refuge protects the last remaining piece of the northern Everglades, 144,000 acres of sawgrass and tree islands held back from the sugar fields just to the west. Mornings are best, before the heat lifts the haze.
The place, in three passes.
Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge sits at the northern end of the Everglades system in Palm Beach County, west of Boynton Beach. Established in 1951 under a lease from the South Florida Water Management District, the refuge covers about 144,000 acres of freshwater marsh, sawgrass, wet prairie, and cypress strands. It is the last remaining remnant of the northern Everglades, bordered on every side by sugar cane fields and suburban canals. The Cypress Swamp Boardwalk runs roughly 0.4 miles from the Lee Road Visitor Center into one of the densest pond-apple and bald-cypress sloughs in the refuge.
The water in the cypress swamp is the colour of strong tea. It carries tannins leached from cypress needles and decomposing leaf litter, which stains the slough dark brown but stays remarkably clear when held in a hand. The slough sits within the larger Water Conservation Area 1, an impoundment that holds back rainfall from the surrounding cane fields and feeds south toward the Everglades proper. Apple snails cling to pickerelweed stems. Snail kites and limpkins hunt them. The level rises a foot or more in the summer wet season and draws down through the dry months from November to May.
The refuge entrance is on Lee Road off U.S. 441, about ten miles west of I-95. Day use is $5 per vehicle, payable at the kiosk, and the gates open at sunrise and close at sunset. The Visitor Center is open Wednesday through Sunday and anchors both the Cypress Swamp Boardwalk and the longer Marsh Trail. November through April is dry season and the most comfortable window, with lower humidity and the migratory wading-bird concentrations at their peak. Summer brings afternoon thunderstorms and heavy mosquito pressure. The boardwalk is fully accessible and benches are placed at intervals.
