Nature and music are fitting companions. They belong together. Nature informs music. Music compliments nature. The Gasparilla Music Festival is a beautiful example of this harmony.

An hour before a mellow sunset over the Hillsborough River, Best Coast steps onto the main stage and launches into an hour set of their signature style, reverb drenched retro-pop. The palm trees seem to shift gently, feigning a cool indifference to the rhythm. The collective pulse of the crowd, on the other hand, is captured. It stands and it sways, captivated by the scene and entranced by the sound.

Night falls on the festival and the crowd thickens. The new darkness grows heavy with the lingering chill of a seaside city, perched on the brink of Spring in the sunshine state. There feels like no better place to look and to listen. 

January Blooms: Deland Springs Eternal:

Pyrostegia venusta is a dense woody vine, native to southern Brazil, northern Argentina and Paraguay. According to Florida State University’s Horticulture department, however, the plant can grow successfully in peninsular Florida and coastal California along with the southern extremes of Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana. The vine is alternatively known by a variety of colorful names, including flame vine and orange trumpet.

This particular trumpet resides along the wooden fence on the western side of the University Apartment Complex on Stetson’s campus. The vine grows quickly and hardily under a variety of often-inhospitable conditions. If left totally unchecked, the orange trumpet can climb terrific heights and densely cover other plant species—sometimes killing them. It can be spotted around Volusia and neighboring counties, blooming vividly throughout the month of January. 

Nature, broadly defined: a photo record of the first Fall weekend at Flagler Beach. 

Ohio State Route 531, locally known as Lake Road, stretches only the short distance from Conneaut to Geneva-on-the-lake. In that span, however, this coastal avenue affords many unobstructed views over the wooded banks and sheer cliffs that line the central southern shore of Lake Erie.  

Skimboarding during the early gloom, just south of Wabasso Beach, is both a tranquil and revitalizing morning exercise. The beach is vacant. The surf seems to have preserved a trace of an expiring nocturnal chill. And everything looks like a clean slab of rough slate, simply suffering the daily wait to be dutifully washed with colors from the coming dawn. Now, the wet sand is gray. The gentle waves are gray. The sunless sky is gray.

There is, however, a small movement across the sand—or a series of movements, isolated sections of the sand shifting underfoot and inching toward the water. The wet sand looks alive. The sight demands a closer inspection.

All around the skimboard are newborn sea turtles, each about the size of a fifty-cent coin, just liberated from their eggs and making their great escape across an exposing no-man’s land and into the relative safety of the sea. One turtle, unintentionally rebuffed by the barrier of a certain fiberglass board, is momentarily about-faced—but not confused. Instinct appears strong. The baby turtle resets its course, turning four little fins at full speed and disappearing into the surf.

The turtles do not slow. They do not stop. And in a matter of seconds, they are all gone. Behind, they leave a series of faint tracks and—somewhere on the edge of the dunes—a pile of disturbed sand mixed with broken eggshells. There’s little to do now but continue down the coast. The moment is over and the morning isn’t likely to promise any finer surprises.

Yet the brief event does cast the shoreline into a new context of understanding. It functions as a fatal line of demarcation for many creatures; they cannot survive crossing to the opposite side. Meanwhile, the turtles cannot survive without crossing to the opposite side, transcending the confines of either world. For individual survival, each organism must find the water. For collective survival, the species must make a foray upon the shore.

The worn side of a defunct service station basks in the day’s final rays beside the desolate juncture of two county roads in northwestern Ohio. The scene would make a fitting backdrop for a Sherwood Anderson story.

Transporting plants can be problematic. The branches bend or break—and pots have a tendency to topple, even when seemingly secured. All things considered, car rides are a rough turn for the botanical type.

So when circumstances suggested the relocation of a mature hibiscus, neither party was particularly pleased—the flower’s feelings, of course, divined by measured presumption. A year before, this particular plant had been nursed back to thriving health from near death and it wouldn’t suit well to kill it now.

The hibiscus rode on the floor before the front passenger seat. Its diverging stems, crowded with serrated oval-shaped leaves and elegant coral-pink flowers, stretched clearly above the glove box to peer out the windshield and side window. The ride began before daylight and the hibiscus looked as happy as could be expected.

Just a few miles south of Fernandina Beach, day began to break. The sun, still shrouded by the gray haze of an east coast morning, started to burn the mist away from the estuary below. And by the time the car glided down the last truss-held span of highway and across the Georgia border, the warmth of the sun felt strong, like the beginning of another sultry day in the sunshine state.

As the car rushed on, over the hard top of I-95, a seemingly unlikely and certainly incongruous site unfolded. The hibiscus bloomed. A new row of flowers emerged—just as they would at the plants home spot on the porch. Perhaps the potted plant is a more resilient traveller than anticipated.

Then, by some auspicious stroke of synchronized providence, Mike Love’s voice began floating through the branches of the blooming hibiscus, singing “Daybreak Over the Ocean,” a cut from the Beach Boys’ first album of new originals in twenty years—an unlikely blooming of their own. 

And for a brief moment, even while barreling along the interstate, all of life resonated in pleasant harmony.        

A young white-tailed deer, or Odocoileus virginianus, tentatively peers over the edge of a dark hollow in a wooded area of Palm Coast, Florida. Different sub-species thrive in a diverse variety of environments, ranging from northern Canada to well within South America. Generally, deer follow Bergmann’s rule: animals within a wide-spread species or genius decrease in size as they near the equator.