THIS GARDEN:
Oysters and Place in Spring Creek, Florida
The small fishing village of Spring Creek, Florida dead ends into the Gulf of Mexico. Aquaculturists in Spring Creek plant and tend oysters. There, they work to rebuild the small fishing community in now decades in decline.
Oysters are a keystone species for both environment and culture. For the oyster farmers, crabbers, and fishermen in Spring Creek, the Gulf is a garden. Oyster seeds are planted, tended and harvested. Marine life teams among their shells. People, animals, and the environment act upon each other. Knowledge and meaning is imbued into the contours of the land and the tidal currents. In this garden, people cultivate life, and black drum fish eat the cull. Gregarious pelicans perch atop cages of oysters and listen. The Gulf gives and takes with the pull of the tide.
As a sixth-generation Floridian, I returned to the wild, clarifying water that flowed through so much of my own life experience. Tramping through salt marsh and palmetto, I documented the environmental, economic, and social changes being wrought in my native state.
“This garden, which is the Gulf of Mexico—or farm, it's beyond all that—has all this produce to offer and the best thing you can do to it is do nothing to it. But things are changing. . .”
— Leo Lovel