Australian tree dropped from aeroplanes over Florida's Everglades

In 1936, Florida landowner Hully Sterling scattered melaleuca seeds from an aeroplane over the eastern Everglades, aiming to dry out the swamp for agriculture.

Melaleuca (paperbark tree), introduced from Australia, spread across nearly 500,000 acres of South Florida, altering water flow, fire behavior, and native plant life.

The tree was introduced via more than a dozen separate events, with the earliest documented in Sarasota County in 1886, after failures with over 20 eucalyptus species.

The deliberate aerial seeding was part of a broader policy; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also planted melaleuca to stabilize levees around Lake Okeechobee in the 1930s.