6093 SE Dixie Highway
Stuart, Martin County

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Seabranch Preserve offers a little bit of everything. Scrub, scrubby pinelands, baygalls and mangrove forests. Easy hiking and something more adventurous. It's the kind of place where you don't know what you might run into, even a wild hog or two or three. We did.

It's another one of Martin County's wilderness areas where the emphasis is on wilderness. There are a few interpretive signs near the trail head, but otherwise, it's just you and nature. There is a small parking lot, a portable toilet, some picnic tables and drinking water. There is a 1.3-mile paved trail that is part of the Florida East Coast Greenway open to hikers, bikers and roller bladers. Altogether, there's something on the order of eight miles of hiking trails.

As noted, much of the trails are easy walking, but there are a few that make you wonder whether there's a trail at all. Makes for interesting exploring. During our visit in May 2015, we spotted numerous wildflowers, including candy root, pale meadowbeauty, pineland heliotrope and Feay's prairieclover. We crossed paths with a gopher tortoise, and of course there were the wild hogs. We could hear birds but rarely saw them. But we can imagine the trees full of migrating warblers a few weeks before our visit.