Friends of the Wild Flower Garden
A web of present and past events
These short articles are written to highlight connections of the plants, history and lore of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden with different time frames or outside connections. A web of intersections.
This Month
Friends Annual Meeting Guest Speaker
The Wildflower Garden in August
The story behind the name - Riddell's Goldenrod
Happenstance at the welcome kiosk - A woman walks by . . .
Guest speaker announced for Friends Annual Meeting
The Annual Meeting of the Friends will be at 7 PM on Tuesday October 10, 2023
Our guest speaker will be Alan Branhagen, Executive Director of Natural Land Institute in Rockford, IL. He will speak on “Looking Forward to a Livelier Landscape.” Indigenous plant-based landscapes, the best is yet to come!
Until recently, Mr. Branhagen was Director of Operations at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Venue will be announced at a later date. All all welcome.
The Wildflower Garden in August
By August we have moved into the late-summer season of flower blooms. Some of the early summer blooming plants continue their bloom period well into the late summer period, while some of those blooming after mid-July are already past. The Upland Garden will be a riot of color as the month progresses, appropriate to mark the month of Eloise Butler's birthday (August 3, 1851).
- In the upland, the monarda’s and the yellow coneflowers and sunflowers will color the hillsides and the tallest flowering forb in the Garden will make its appearance - the Prairie Dock.
- The chicory’s, both white and blue can be spotted but the flowers will only open in the sun and may close by early afternoon, hence the common name of "blue sailors,” even if they are white.
- Offsetting all the yellows is another white flower - the flowering spurge. Look for a multi-branched inflorescence of small white flowers but don’t be deceived by what look like white petals - instead those appendages are part of the spurge families unique flower structure which you can learn about on our fact sheet.
- In the woodland and wetland expect to see many yellow Touch-me-nots and maybe spot from the boardwalk the pale rosy-purple flowers of the obedient plant.
- Interested in summer programs at the Garden? - visit the \Garden’s website for a listing.
- Here is a photo reference to an entire cast of late summer blooming plants - as they bloom at different times, each visit will present something different.
Below: Flowering Spurge, (Euphorbia corollata)
The story behind a name - Riddell's Goldenrod
When a plant is named for someone there is usually an interesting interconnection in the background. Such is the case with Riddell’s Goldenrod, named for John Leonard Riddell.
The full scientific name for the plant is Solidago riddellii Frank ex Riddell. This surnames after the Latin refer to the person(s) who wrote up the accepted description of the plant.
Riddell was honored by the first classifier of the plant - Joseph C. Frank ( ?- 1835), a German Botanist who was sent to North America to travel and collect specimens for a German botanical society, the name of which has been lost. While in Cincinnati Ohio, he became acquainted with Riddell who was serving as Adjunct Professor of Chemistry and Lecturer on Botany in the Cincinnati Medical College where he had received his M.D. Frank, having discovered a new goldenrod species in his Ohio travels, named it Riddell’s Goldenrod in Riddell's honor. Frank had published in Germany Rastadts Flora and in the United States he studied grasses and sedges, of which Eragrostis Frankii is named for him.
But, as is often the case, Frank’s classification work was not as complete as it should have been, so the reclassification was done by another botanist, none other than Riddell himself and thus we have the authorship classification accepted today of Solidago riddellii Frank ex Riddell - the "ex" meaning that Riddell updated the work of Frank.
John Leonard Riddell, was an American chemistry professor, botanist, writer, and medical doctor. He was born in Massachusetts, but most of his botanical observations were in the central states from Ohio southward. His important work was a “Synopsis of the Flora of the Western States” defined in that era as the territory from the Allegheny mountains to the Platte River in Missouri Territory. It was in great part a compilation. He later published Catalogus Florae Ludovicianae, (The flora of Louisiana). He later became chair of the Chemistry Department in the Medical College of Louisiana (which then became the University of Louisiana at Tulane, which position he held until his death. It was there he invented the first practical binocular microscope.
He also found time to be the melter and refiner of the New Orleans Mint, a position confirmed by President John Tyler following an internal mint dispute. He was appointed Postmaster of New Orleans, which position he held even during the Civil War despite Confederate appointments intended to displace him. All this and he still had time to publish a science fiction story giving an account of a fictional former student named Orrin Lindsay, who traveled to the moon and Mars.
The plant genus Riddellia was named for Riddell. Two other plants in the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden also bear Riddell’s classification authorship - Sky-blue Aster and Snow Trillium.
Fact sheet on Riddell's Goldenrod.
Fruit for rooters
This is all about a plant named the hog peanut.
Here is another linkage of two seeming unrelated things - hogs and peanuts - uniting in the form of the plant bearing the name “hog peanut,” Amphicarpaea bracteata, which you will find in many parts of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden in late summer, particularly in the upland. You have to look for the long stalked tri-parted leaf appearing among other plant stems, on the hog peanut’s long twining reddish color vine.
The flowers are fairly typical of the pea family plants, white tube shaped with and upright banner petal that takes on many shaded of blue to lavender or white. These flowers will mature to a flat oblong pod, much like a garden pea, containing 1 to 4 black bean-like seeds, which are edible.
But that is not where all the action is. This plant has a second kind of flower, one that is self-fertile and never opens. These (called “chasmogamous flowers”) are produced on stolons located at ground level and when ripe send a shoot that penetrates into the soil and forms a fuzzy brown tough skinned pear-shaped edible tuber-like seed -like a peanut. Hogs come in the story as they are good rooters to dig them up. Rodents do a good job also. And so can people - just don’t rob the treasury.
You will find this plant growing in many places in the metro area and across Minnesota as only 10 counties have not reported it. Yes, it is indigenous to the Wildflower Garden. Since we have another article in this edition dealing with plant authorship, I should mention that the final classification author for this plant, Merritt Fernald, wrote an excellent book titled Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America.
Happenstance at the welcome kiosk - A woman walks by . . .
A woman walks by the Garden and stops at the welcome kiosk where Friends president Jennifer Olson has volunteer duty. They talk. Here is the story from Jennifer:
In the April 1957 issue of The Friends newsletter, The Fringed Gentian™ Martha Crone wrote “our charter member, Edith Schussler has written a book, Doctors, Dynamite and Dogs, a memoir of their time in Taft, MT where Dr Schussler was a railroad doctor.” In December of 2019, the New York Times wrote an article about Taft, now a ghost town but they have discovered a cemetery which had been lost to time. They cited Mrs Schussler because her book is the only written word they have about Taft - when it was a railroad town while they built a 1.6 mile tunnel.
That part of the railway is now a bike trail and one can ride through 9 tunnels including the one in Taft which was being built 1907-09 when the Schusslers lived there. More murders than Chicago and 5 prostitutes to every man.
Ironically when I worked at the kiosk on Tuesday, a women walked by with her dog. She was checking places of her youth when she lived in Golden Valley. I told her the above story and she has ridden on this trail - the Hiawatha Bike Trail. She told me to be sure to bring a head lamp.
Dr Schussler grew up at Schussler’s mill on Minnehaha Creek on the border of Hopkins and St Louis Park. He wrote 2 small books - Riverside Reveries which includes a 7 page essay about the Gardens and Pills which is a book about his dog when he was the doctor in a gold rush mining town in Alaska.
Here are some other tidbits about the Schusslers. Edith was a pupil of Eloise Butler and became a friend of Martha Crone. Her last known visit to the Garden was in 1938 and we have correspondence from her from 1939 when she and the doctor were wintering in Tempe Arizona. In 1928 Dr. Schussler proposed to the Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners that the “great oak” on Franklin Terrace by protected by an ornamental iron fence to protect the roots and that the old tree be named the Eloise Butler Oak. The idea was referred to the improvement committee and apparently not heard from again.
Below: Edith Schussler is 3rd from the right in this photo from Eloise Butler's 80th birthday gathering in 1931. Identity the others at this link. Photo - Martha Crone Collection, MHS
Identification booklet for most of the flowering forbs and small flowering shrubs of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden. Details Here.
All selections published in 2023