Naples botanist catalogs nature’s chaos
George Wilder doesn’t know what, exactly, he’s looking for on this cloudy morning in May.
He’s riding on a swamp buggy with a band of fellow searchers, bumping across a prairie at the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary on the way to a hardwood hammock forest off in the distance.
Wilder, 75, a retired botanist, spent the past two years making 160 forays like these into the sanctuary in rural Collier County. He and his co-researcher, Jean McCollom, finished their field work in October, creating the most complete inventory yet of what’s growing at Corkscrew.
It’s an ambitious pursuit, cataloging nature’s chaos; walking, wading, climbing over, under and around for hours in the woods, their eyes scouring the spongy ground for a glimpse of a flower or a leaf of a plant they didn’t know would be there.
Wilder says it beats watching TV.
“You wander, and you things,” he says.
As a freshman at Cornell University, Wilder was lost.
He said he didn’t know what he wanted to do or even who he was. Then, he took a personality test. The results showed a knack for science and art. Wilder found both in botany. He credits his mother with instilling in him a love of nature when he was growing up in Yonkers, N.Y. At first drawn to animals, he ended up preferring find plants.
“More subtle, Wilder says.
He earned a doctorate in botany from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and did postdoctoral work in botany at Harvard University, including a stint in Panama studying the leaf development of Panama hat plants.
When he retired as a professor of biology at Cleveland State University in 2003 and moved to Naples with his wife, Rebecca, he brought his art with him.
Wilder’s herbarium is a kind of museum where he keeps the plants collected, pressed and preserved over a lifetime. Stems are bent at dramatic right angles or graceful curves. Petals are arranged just so. Volunteers help glue them onto archival paper.
He’s up to 40,229 specimens. And he’s still wandering, still finding.
“I hope I do this until my last day on Earth,” Wilder said. “I can’t stay away from it.”
Even the air seems tinged green inside the forest. The clouds have given way to a blue sky. Sunshine floats through the canopies of trees that have rooted in just the right spot to catch the light. Plants grow, high and low.
Few, if any, straight paths open up through the woods. Instead, Wilder picks his way along, often finding himself suddenly walking alone but never lost. The crew keeps track of each other with an occasional high-pitched, “Woot!”
Otherwise, they walk mostly in silence except for the crack of sticks breaking underfoot, or an less conspicuous,” excited shout of discovery from out of nowhere.
“Another one! Another one! Good for you, Jean!” Wilder says to his co-researcher, marveling at her find, scrawling some notes in a beat-up spiral notebook.
Wilder, a thin man with a soft voice, travels lighter on these expeditions than he did when he was younger. He asks others to carry his trusty plant identification books and the wooden press used to get specimens back to his lab at Naples Botanical Garden.
He always carries a compass, just in case, and a knife, also just in case, along with a pair of plant scissors. He wears a small magnifying glass on a cord around his neck. A diabetic, he always has a banana within reach and plenty of water.
He stops to admire a pop ash tree. Resurrection ferns cover its bark. Shoestring ferns hang from its limbs.
“Isn’t that spectacular?” Wilder asks.
Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary manager Jason Lauritsen says he can’t really manage Corkscrew unless he knows what is there to manage.
“I couldn’t pay someone value of this work,” he says.
The most recent Corkscrew plant list from 1999 has fewer than 600 species. Wilder and McCollom have added roughly 200 plants to the list, they report in a peer-reviewed paper to be published next summer. Of the newly recorded 773 plants, researchers in Florida and elsewhere consider more than 40 of them imperiled. the