When Alice Earle began cultivating her natural yard [in 1954] in the wide-open spaces of then unicorporated Pinellas County, she didn’t realize she was practicing ecology before the word was coined.” Thus began a 1990 article in the Tampa Bay Times.

As a pioneer of conservation, Alice Earle developed a flourishing 3.5-acre sanctuary of native trees and shrubs including cedars, willow, cypress, mulberries, and magnolia that welcomed American egrets, great blue herons, wood ducks, mallards, and owls as well as squirrels, opossum, racoons, and foxes. As the city of Dunedin grew up around her home, she maintained its natural beauty, welcoming guests through a front yard of rock gardens and bromeliads and leading them to a serene, light-dappled pond ringed by natural foliage with its animal residents. In 1990, Earle Park, as her home was then called, was designated a Backyard Wildlife Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.

Alice Earle shared her skills as an architect of natural beauty with her three children, Lewis, Earle, and Sylvia. Perhaps her most devoted student, Sylvia, today renowned oceanographer and Hero for the Planet Dr. Sylvia Earle, has carried on her mother’s vision. Her own children, Elizabeth, Richie, and Gale, join her in maintaining Lake Earle as a natural sanctuary. Not only is the land and its lake an example of the beauty and health a natural wildlife habitat can bring to a community, but it is a template for others in the community to create small, healthy ecosystems whose waters feed and ensure the health of the nearby Gulf waters.

Besides its NWF designation, it is today also a “Home Grown National Park” and a Dunedin Historic Landmark. The Earle family’s shared vision is to make Lake Earle a living laboratory that educates the Dunedin community to act by creating their own natural paradises. Together these will form a conservation network of hope for the future of the planet.