What's really incredible is that there is almost nothing of value in that vast pile of brush. We have live oak, laurel oak, red maple, slash pine (a Florida native pine, kind of sparse, but not bad when you get used to them), palmettos, cabbage palm, queen palm, and assorted ground cover like ferns, wild azaleas and such. We touched almost none of it. In the brush pile are 3 pines, a couple of small cabbage palms, and one each of a decent cabbage palm and a decent oak which had the nerve to be right in the middle of where I want to put the barn.
As you can see, the property is now almost open. There is still a lot of brush, saplings and shoots at the base of most of the stuff we left, a good deal of which will have to be removed by hand because anything the tractor can do might damage the roots of the Good Stuff. We also left a couple of natural "islands" here and there that we will thin by hand. I expect this grooming to take 3 - 5 years, but in the end, we will have what I hope is a graceful, park-like setting consisting of mostly native growth, plus some really gorgeous flowering trees we will be planting.
