It’s a gorgeous December afternoon along the shores of Boca Ciega Bay. I’m standing at the southern edge of Eckerd College campus, where Frenchman’s Creek drains into the bay, watching sunshine glitter off the wake of passing boats and sift through the dense clump of mangroves at Maximo Point, just across the channel. I’m waiting for my friend Tyler, who directs Eckerd’s coastal management program and has promised to show me around the College’s new living shoreline installation, a grouping of plants and riprap meant to protect this erosion-prone section of its coastline. Snatches of students’ conversations in the nearby dog park drift by: a killer chemistry exam, roommate drama, plans for the upcoming break. The sun beats down and I peel off my jean jacket; by the time Tyler arrives, I’ve started to sweat. Even after 11 years, I’m still not quite used to Christmastime in Florida.
The night before, we’d put up our tree: the six-and-a-half feet, prelit, made-in-China ersatz evergreen we’ve affectionately dubbed “Wesley Spruce” after the name printed on the box. (It’s worth noting that there is no such species as a Wesley Spruce. This is apparently a marketing name created by Christmas tree manufacturers to designate a particularly lush and lifelike type of artificial tree). I’ll admit, I have mixed feelings about using an artificial tree; growing up, I relished the yearly trip to the tree lot, the delightful man-versus-tree wrestling match between my dad and our chosen conifer that inevitably followed, and the sweet green smell of fir that would fill the living room all season. I also know that, by the time you balance the plastics, the carbon footprint of shipping millions of artificial trees around the world, and the carbon mitigation provided by all those Christmas tree farms, you really should just buy a live tree. It’s what real treehuggers do. And yet, our family has been ringing in the holidays with our scraggly, smells-like-attic Wesley Spruce since 2014.
But, of course, there’s more to the story. Christmas 2014 was the first one we’d spent in the house my husband and I had bought together. I had just left a good job that had gone sour, and was moping anchorless and miserable through bright December days that felt like an affront to my sad state of mind. Wesley caught our eye on a routine trip to Home Depot; we needed a tree, and I think my husband knew it might cheer me up a bit. So we brought Wesley home, patiently unpacking and stacking his octopus-like tiers, tenderly untangling and fluffing his feathery-plastic boughs, and covering him with two boxes worth of gold balls—all the ornaments we had at the time. Since then, Wesley’s finery has grown: my tarnished silver First Christmas ‘82 bell (still plays “Joy to the World” if you wind it up enough), my husband’s collection of owl ornaments, and all manner of painted and googly-eyed creations produced by our son over the years. We deck Wesley out, plug him in, and, every time, there it is—that sentimental catch in my throat that means the Christmas season has officially begun. An awkward beginning turned strangely lovely.
Looking around me, I could say the same about the living shoreline. As we wade into waist-high spartina grass, I’m amazed by what I see. Just 16 months before, one broiling August afternoon, I had stood in this very spot, helping a throng of Eckerd students and staff plant grasses and shrubs in a patch of raw, sandy soil. Dodging shovel-swings and flying sand, I’d eased spartina and muhly grass plants from their pots, chatting with my planting partner about her first semester in college. We’d made a little game of wishing each plant luck as we patted it into the ground. When we finished and stepped back for a drink of water, it didn’t look like anything so grand as a living shoreline; it looked like a phalanx of ragged recruits, transfer-shocked plants stationed across 400 feet of bare soil. If I had understood the drubbing those little plants were to face in the next two months with the arrivals of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, I might have wished them more than luck. Parts of the installation had to be completely replanted.
But now, the picture is altogether different. Up and down stream, marsh grasses grow in wild profusion, slender stalks swept this way and that like tousled hair. They slope gently down to the water, sheltering gray-green tufts of salt bush, fiery splotches of blanketflower, and, right along the edge, scrappy stalks of red mangrove. Along the shaved-down remnant of the seawall—all that remains of a structure that had armored Eckerd’s shoreline for decades—Tyler finds new patches of oysters growing. And these aren’t the only signs of life: we find narrow wildlife trails winding through the grass and the delicate footprints of raccoon and possum along the low tide line. We also find slightly broader paths cut by students—known in the restoration business as “social trails”—down to the riprap, a prime fishing spot. And, wedged in the watery hole between the boulders and the old wall, one punchy little crab.
Our campus, like so many other waterfront properties on Tampa Bay, is reckoning with the long term impacts of the dredge and fill craze that swept this part of Florida in the 1940s-1960s—the construction boom that brought ecological disaster to Boca Ciega Bay and became, as former State Representative Roger Wilson told Tampa Bay Newspapers in 2019, “a national representation of how not to dredge and fill.” By some estimates, as much as a quarter of the bay bottom of Boca Ciega was scraped up and piled into finger islands, destroying seagrass meadows and mangrove banks that had once nourished one of the most productive estuaries in Florida. Add to this the runoff and sewage that followed from all that development, it’s no surprise that environmentalists declared Tampa Bay “dead” by the 1970s.
Looking at old aerial photographs in the College archives, you can’t help but notice the startling fact that the western third of our campus did not exist—at least not as land—before the late 1960s. (Fun fact: the Ratner Fill project, which completed our campus and also laid the groundwork for neighboring Isla del Sol, helped spark the controversy which led to Zabel v. Tabb, a court ruling that called for the Army Corps of Engineers to take the cumulative effects of any dredging project into consideration when granting permits. It helped spell the end of the dredge and fill era.) The miles of sea wall that hold all that dredged land in place are now fighting a losing battle with time, tide, and sea level rise, all of which gradually erode and undermine them. It’s a common sight in the Tampa Bay area: places where land behind a seawall has subsided into ankle-twisting gaps and holes, where the concrete has begun to buckle and crack.
Living shorelines are promoted as a “green infrastructure” alternative to this overabundance of concrete that works on multiple levels: they absorb the wave energy that causes erosion, while creating habitat for wildlife—or in many cases, restoring lost habitat. They also scrub runoff headed into the bay, removing pollutants and improving the water quality that is so important for seagrass meadows and all the species they support. Where dredge and fill degraded the estuary, living shorelines repair, bit by bit.
We’ve wandered now to the end of the installation, where the cordgrass peters out into the shade of trees and the sidewalk curves away to the west. I start to thank Tyler for his time, but then he points out something interesting: the seawall keeps going, curving along the imposing wall of mangroves that shield the southernmost tip of the campus. As many times as I’ve walked (or even paddled) this quarter mile stretch of the shore, I never once noticed the old sea wall. And it’s easy to see why: red, black, and white mangroves all grow here, sheltering in their deep green shadows beach shrubs, vines, and fiddler crabs. In some places, sand has accumulated so deep that palm trees grow, and every once in a while, the vast mangrove hedge breaks to form a tiny secret beach. The seawall runs just landward of this hidden world, in some places a sizable hop above it, in others just barely visible above the soil.
I’m momentarily bewildered. This isn’t what seawalls are supposed to do. Seawalls cut a clear, immaculate line between land and water; they let us roll our carpets of sand or sod right up to the edge of the bay and dangle our toes over; they slice through the map to turn nature’s messy edges into precise geometric shapes. But this seawall is…not doing that.
Tyler sees the question on my face. It’s all about wave energy, he explains. Back at the living shoreline, boats coming into the creek cut their engines at the “No Wake” channel marker, ironically sending a surge of wake toward the encroaching banks of the creek. I’d seen that clearly enough when we were there; every time a boat passed, wavelets churned up, crashing into the old sea wall and bouncing back. Over time, this rough movement gouges out the sediment in front of the seawall, making it difficult for anything to grow. But at this point on the wall, the shifting sands slowed down, accumulated, transformed into the floor of a mangrove forest. Why? Tyler points out into the bay, where the emerald hump of Indian Key, an undeveloped mangrove island, rises out of the water just a third of a mile away. It’s possible, he says, that the key sheltered this part of the wall from the wind and waves, letting the sand settle and mangroves take root—an accidental forest.
My mind jumps back to our Christmas tree in all its synthetic glory. What makes it lovely, I decide, is not its perfect imitation of nature (no matter how “Wesley Spruce” it may be). Instead, it’s the way it catches and holds our memories—the bells, owls, and other flotsam borne in on the tide of our life together—like a tidal flat transformed into a hidden beach. To fully appreciate it requires a firsthand understanding of our family’s history, the auld lang syne we’re always singing about this time of year.
In the same way, living shorelines complicate a simple understanding of “nature” versus “manmade.” They aren’t just about replacing the unnatural hardscaping laid down by generations past with something greener, something prettier—after all, living shorelines are also engineered by human hands (as the blisters on my thumbs that not-to-long-ago August day will attest). And, as much good as they can do for slowing erosion, enhancing habitat, and improving water quality, they’re not just about bringing those benefits to any one site. At heart, living shorelines require an understanding of the complex, unique-to-every-installation agencies of water, wind, sediment, plants, and animals; they require us to see how one location is connected to the others around it, to think—with apologies to Aldo Leopold—not like a mountain, but like an estuary.
I’ve zoned out. Tyler’s probably wondering what’s wrong with me, but it’s just sweet visions of oyster reefs dancing in my head. You can keep your Frosty snowmen and winter wonderlands, I’ve found my Florida Christmas groove. It’s Oyster the World, Away in a Mangrove, The Nutcracker Marshgrass: the pretty darn miraculous way the bay can heal itself, if we help it.
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This article appears in Dec. 18 – 24, 2025.