Once upon a time, Pondhawk Natural Area was a very wet place. According to county records, 40 percent of the land now part of Pondhawk was marsh or some type of wetland. Improvements made to the area's drainage system — the canals — during the 1960s and '70s changed the landscape and surrounding habitats to something on the drier side. When Palm Beach County began restoring the land, it dug this 8.8-acre basin marsh as a nod to Pondhawk's watery past. The marsh is thick with sawgrass, pickerelweed, bulrush, duck potato, spike rush,buttonbush and other water-loving plants. A pond apple tree, likely planted by the county, frames the photo. Between 2009 and 2019, the county planted more than 83,000 trees, shrubs and grasses, the majority of which went into and around this marsh. NEXT PHOTO.
