The wild orchids are blooming on a windy day in early spring. From the bank of the C-111 canal that runs from Taylor Slough in the Everglades to Manatee Bay, we find them in a sea of sawgrass accented with green dots of willows, saltbush and buttonwood.

The orchids, called grass pinks, Calapogon tuberosus, grow in marly soils of the freshwater marsh, soils that dry early in spring instead of staying wet most of the year.

This expanse of freshwater prairie belongs to the South Florida Water Management District and abuts land saved by Miami-Dade County's Environmentally Endangered Lands (EEL) program. Together, the parcels link Everglades National Park with Biscayne National Park.

Broward, Palm Beach and 27 other counties in Florida also make efforts to acquire and manage segments of endangered natural areas scattered like pot shards across the developed landscape. They are ours to appreciate and keep for the future.

Here's a look at four natural landscapes and some of the components making them so prized.

WETLANDS

In the Southern Glades, we stop to find wildflowers: Samolusparviflorus, the water pimpernel with tiny pinkish-white flowers; yellowtop, with clusters of tiny yellow flowers held on one plane like a flat-topped umbrella; fat lavender thistles with silvery leaves that are in the daisy family; delicate marsh pinks with their yellow centers.

Bird life is fairly sparse. Gwen Burzycki, with the Department of Environmental Resources Management, says, ''We're seeing fewer and fewer wading birds in the last couple of years.'' Still, we identify double-crested cormorants, great blue and little blue herons, tricolor herons, snowy egrets, osprey, kingfishers and grebes.

To get here, we head down the 18-mile stretch of U.S. 1 between Florida City and Key Largo, turn east at a rock road, then drive back under a bridge. In May, a month or so after our visit, a panther is killed by a car on this stretch of highway, underscoring the need for the wildlife culverts being added as the road is widened.

We end up alongside the C-111 canal, which cuts through the Southern Glades like a lightning strike. Alongside it runs a 13-mile public bike path.

Dug in the 1960s, the 20-foot-deep C-111 was intended to carry barges laden with rocket boosters from the Aerojet manufacturing plant in far South Dade out to the bay, where they would travel to Cape Canaveral. The state bought the Aerojet property in the 1980s and now manages it for wildlife.

Native poisonwood trees proliferate along the canal's northern spoil bank. Their late fall crop of fruit makes them magnets for white-crowned pigeons.

Spike rush, arrowhead and sawgrass, frogs, crayfish, marsh rabbits, deer and panthers share this big sky space, but an irritated alligator impatiently heads to mid-canal and stares back, waiting for us to vacate his lurking spot by the bank.

Working our way back to Card Sound Road, we bump and bounce through double ruts to another freshwater prairie, where Burzycki shows us two more endangered plants: creamy white colicroot, Aletris bracteata, and the lavender ground orchid, Bletia purpurea, with shy flowers that never fully open.

Colicroot has thin leaves that grow in a rosette from which the flower spike arises. Its bitter roots are said to treat colic. You would not know it's here without its flowers, which are tiny and cream-colored, attached along upright spikes like small corn kernels. They open from the bottom to the top of the stalk. Dozens of plants are blooming here, many of them along the roadside, showing a preference for a slight elevation.

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