Then and Now at Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden
The Garden Shelters in Winter - 50 Years apart
| Fifty-two years separate the photo immediately below and the second winter scene further below. The "little cabin" that was the Garden tool room, office, visitor center & shelter is seen tucked into the winter snowdrifts on March 9, 1953. It is visited occasionally in the winter by the Garden Curator, Martha Crone, as the winding depression in the snow, which is the path from the front gate, indicates. All is quiet on a brilliant winter day - the kind Martha would be thinking of when she wrote "What a Fairyland the woods present after a snowstorm. The new snow muffles the echoes, and there is a new beauty where only bare bleakness existed before." (The Fringed Gentian™, Jan. 1955). Photo from a Kodachrome taken by Martha Crone, courtesy Minnesota Historical Society, Martha Crone Collection. |
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| Below, 52 years later in early 2005, the replacement for the "little cabin", the Martha Crone Visitors Shelter, sits under a blanket of snow. To compare the locations of the two photos, go to the bottom photo. Photo - Friends of the Wild Flower Garden, Inc. |
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| Below: In this photo from April 20, 2008, we see the Martha Crone Visitors Shelter on the plateau of level ground that sits midway between the front Garden gate and the lower elevation of the woodland bog. At lower left center in the photo is the open patio area with three benches which are on the approximate site of the earlier Garden Office shown in the top photo. That would place the Crone Shelter (in the top photo) to the far right of the old Garden Office. Photo - Friends of the Wild Flower Garden, Inc. |
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