“Things are not always as they seem.” This has always been one of my favorite quotes from Hamlet. “Seems, madame? Nay it is. I know not seems.” It is a scream for rationalism in an irrational world, gone awry, turned topsy turvy, insane, existential.

First of all, I have been on vacation in Key Biscayne and Miami, Florida. Over the next several days I will bring many of the photographs that I took there: birds, reptiles, orchids, and luscious tropical greenery.

I’d like to begin with the image of Figure 1, which shows the rain forest at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden – now one of my favorite places on Earth, or so it seems. Look at it, so green and wonderful with the four requisite strata of tropical rain forests: emergent, canopy, understory, and forest floor.  Is something missing? Yes. There are no birds, no monkeys, and the photograph tells it all. As my traveling companion pointed out there is no sound. The forest is mute. Yet it has a story to tell.

It is kind of like Disney World an artificial man-made rain forest, only the plants are real. Even the mist is human created. Things are not always as they seem. Yet the day may come when only such man-made rain forests will exist. Indeed, even this one, so lovingly and laboriously created may eventually wither in the next century as climate in Florida changes from gloriously warm to withering hot.

Right now, you literally want to caress the plants and solemnly kiss the orchids, they are all so very wonderful. As I present this series of photographs to you, it is worth noting that many of the animals and plants photographed are transplanted invasive species.

“I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.””

Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley