Ray Wunderlich III walks through Little Bayou Park in south St. Petersburg, Fla. He walks the grounds nearly every day, enjoying the live oaks, egrets and osprey and policing the park for intruders.
He spots one. He grabs the heart-shaped leaves of a green vine and pulls them out until he uproots a hairy tuber. It’s an air potato that snakes along the ground and up the canopy of trees, blocking out sunlight and killing native species.
“We need to kill them,” said Wunderlich, who helps to spray the plants once a month at the park on Fourth Street and 55th Avenue South.
He is a businessman who makes a living selling nutritional supplements, but he is chiefly a passionate custodian of native plants.
Wunderlich is the Florida Native Plant Society’s representative for Pinellas County. Although he does voluntary work at the organization, he has devoted five years to maintaining strict surveillance of St. Petersburg’s flora.
When he runs or walks around the city he watches for the spread of invasive, exotic species in public parks. He is at the front of a growing environmental movement that seeks to make St. Petersburg a more environmentally friendly city.
The passion for Florida-native plants is at the root of Wunderlich’s longtime relationship with nature.
When Wunderlich, 46, was a boy, he used to play in a forest near his home in the Pinellas Point neighborhood. The place was full of pines and organisms, including insects.
The city cut down the pines and replaced them with St. Augustine grass in an effort to beautify the area.
“There were no more insects,” Wunderlich said. People who think that’s a good thing, he said, “don’t understand the relationship. One species depends upon another.”
Wunderlich tried different things before becoming an environmental advocate. He got a bachelor’s degree in health at the University of South Florida and a master’s in sports administration at Florida State University. He also worked as a high school track and field coach.
He quit his coaching job in the ’80s and tried to make a living recycling plastic bottles. The business failed after a couple of years but he triumphed financially in 1995 when he started selling nutritional supplements.
He became a native-plant activist after he met his wife, Jennifer, a science teacher and bird-watcher. She told him about the importance of native plants in the local ecosystem. He got so interested that he joined the Native Plant Society.
Now, Wunderlich writes grant proposals for the organization and reports invasive plants to local authorities. He recently called the city’s office and asked officials to spray water lettuce spreading on Little Bayou.
The wetland was topped with a thick cover of green lettuce until 2003 when Wunderlich started a recovery effort in the area.
“This park before was a wasteland,” he said. “It didn’t have the variety of plants species it has now.”
It’s not rare now to see osprey, eagles and egrets diving for fish at the lake. Now they can see the fish and catch them.
In another Pinellas Point park, he singles out a towering palm. Trees like those have changed the native ecosystem by shading areas where other plants needed sun to grow.
When he is not at his store, Superior Nutritionals, or running around St. Petersburg parks, he is at home spending time with Jennifer. They live in a one-story house in north St. Petersburg. The yard hosts more than a hundred native plants.
In the afternoons, as they sit in the living room drinking green tea, they use binoculars to watch the Japanese fish they have in a backyard pond and watch insects flying around the garden.
The Wunderlichs recycle, so they only have to put garbage out every six weeks. Jennifer Wunderlich drives a gas-electric hybrid sedan.
Wunderlich, who got the city to replace some pines near his childhood home, has received recognition from the community and from the city for his efforts. Debbie Chayet, a member of the Florida Native Plant Society who has worked with Wunderlich, praises him.
“He is very committed,” she said, “and he is willing to donate a huge amount of this personal life to those things that he cares about.”
But life for the Wunderlich is not a paradise, even in the urban oasis they’ve created.
They are thinking of moving to Colorado.
They said they are tired of the noise of people mowing the lawn on weekends and they’re worried about rising crime. More than that, though, they would like to live in a city where people have a better understanding of nature.
“There is a lot of ignorance,” Wunderlich said.
Wunderlich tells the story of a neighborhood meeting where he tried to explain his drive to revamp a park near the bay. A man in the audience disagreed. Making the park nicer, the man said, would encourage undesirable people to “fornicate.”
The Wunderlichs say they long for a better environment.
“I know that if I go to Denver and start talking to somebody about recycling they are not going to look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about?’ ” Wunderlich said. “That happens a lot here.”
