A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
mangrove
Mangroves are trees and shrubs that grow in salt water along tropical and subtropical coasts, rooted in soft anoxic mud and standing on arching prop roots or sending up thousands of narrow breathing roots that stick straight out of the sediment. They exclude or excrete salt, and they trap sediment between their roots, so a mangrove forest builds the ground it stands on.
Etymology
The word came into English from Spanish and Portuguese in the sixteenth century, and the Iberian form appears to come from a Caribbean or South American Indigenous language. English speakers then reshaped the ending into grove, which is an English word for a stand of trees and which had nothing to do with the original, so the modern spelling contains a piece of folk reasoning.
Notes
Mangrove root tangles are nursery habitat, and a large share of the fish on nearby reefs spend their first months among them. The seeds of several species germinate on the parent tree and drop as long spear-shaped seedlings that plant themselves point-down in mud, or float upright for months until they touch bottom somewhere they can grow.