Twigs and Branches

Friends of the Wildflower 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: Update on the utility buildings, a favorite vagrant of Eloise Butler, how hummingbirds hover, the catchflys, remembering a local poet and a historical Garden photo.

This Month

Utility Building Construction

A Vagrant for the Garden.

How do Hummingbirds hover?

Catchflys and Campions

A Friend of the Wildflower Garden

Historic photo

Utility Building Construction Moves Along.

Construction that began in late April for two new tool and equipment sheds has reached the point where the building shells are in place. They are located just outside the current Garden fence near the rest rooms. These provide much needed space for the Garden’s equipment, most of which currently sits outside. The new buildings will be enclosed within the Garden fence when construction is completed. This project is part of the improvements recommended in the Theodore Wirth Park Master Plan and is funded by the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board (MPRB).

Eloise Butler's original storage and office building existed for 65 years. The current storage building is approaching 50 and has been rehabbed a number of times. New replaces the old.

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A Vagrant for the Wildflower Garden

Eloise Butler called certain plants “vagrants” whose place was the roadside, but just the same, she wanted one of them in her Wildflower Reserve and tried and tried to establish it.

We are speaking of Common Toadflax, more affectionately known as Butter ’n Eggs (Linaria vulgaris), a plantain. It did finally establish itself in the upland in later years where it is tolerated and you will find it in many places on roadsides in the metro area and within the cities. From hard-to-establish then to well-established now!

One must admire the 5-lobed corolla with 4 white lobes forming a nectar tube and one forming a yellow obstruction in the throat of the flower. The leaves are pale and linear on a thin stem. Alas, it is invasive but Eloise tried for 20 years to establish it with plants she found locally and finally during her last winter in Malden MA in 1932, she sent to clump to her friend Gertrude Cram in Minneapolis with instructions to heel them in until spring.

When Eloise died in the spring before collecting the plants, Mrs Cram told Martha Crone that she had a yard full of them and Eloise “might have had an armful.”

Once established it is difficult to eradicate as small root parts will form a new plant. Perhaps it is best to view it along the roads and paths.

Plant information sheet with more photos

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How do Hummingbirds hover?

Flapping their wings 80 times per second was the old but incorrect answer. The real answer is that the birds create lift with both the upstroke and the downstroke of the wing by a special wing adaption allowing them to flip the wing over and hover.

A special bone adaption allows the bird to rotate its shoulder and flip the wing over on each stroke. The wing and feathers are very stiff to allow this.

Graphic ©Maria Amorette Klos

This video from the California Academy of Sciences demonstrates the wing flip: Link to Cal AD website graphic Maria Amorette Klos

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Catchflys and Campions

Summer has on average ten wild flowering plants coming into bloom each week. Now is the time of the genus Silene, flowers known as catchflys and campions.

Some are considered just “weeds” but remember Eloise Butler's admonition that weeds are simply plants out of place. The flowers all have some attraction, some are simply beautiful.

A grouping of Starry Campion is delicate while the stately Royal Catchfly is bold. The White Campion some consider a weed because it is usually found along edges where it can get some sun and room to grow. One must awake at early dawn to see the open flowers of Night-flowering Catchfly.

The Silenes usually have a sticky secretion on the flower calyx or stem, which is why “catchfly” is in many names. “Silene” itself refers to the intoxicated foamy father of Bacchus - Silenus. The flower petals flare widely and the calyx forms a long tube which in some, inflates after fertilization.

We illustrate just four of this genus, but 12 are found in Minnesota, four native and eight introduced. I have included here the Royal Catchfly which is not found in the wild in Minnesota, but is native to the Mississippi valley southward. We have it only in special gardens, including Eloise Butler. Thomas Nuttall called it “one of the most splendid species in existence” in his 1817 North American Plants. Also in the Wildflower Garden is Starry Campion while the remaining two are historical to the Garden. Don’t overlook them.

All will self seed somewhat but be careful with Night-flowering Catchfly - it will self seed aggressively and young plants will come up for years.

Below: Starry Campion, Silene stellata.

Links to plant information sheets:

Night-flowering Catchfly

A Friend of the Wildflower Garden

Betty Bridgman in 1988. Photo by Mary Slettehaugh.

A brief interlude from our normal fare to remember the passing 25 years ago this July of a Minneapolis poet, essayist and lover of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden - Betty Bridgman.

She published over 600 poems and numerous essays, many written for specific publications. The poems reflect her thoughts and observations while traveling but home was a house on Grimes Avenue South in Minneapolis that was once the farm of pioneer Jonathan Grimes.

Betty was associated with Friends of the Wildflower Garden for many years and is remembered for her dry wit, her campaign to eliminate the word “false” from flower names and for the poems she wrote for the occasion of the 1970 dedication of the Martha E. Crone Shelter at the Wildflower Garden and for the 30th anniversary of the founding of Friends of the Wildflower Garden which was also the 75th anniversary of the Wildflower Garden.

Here is a sample of the shelter dedication poem:

You are good people. You mean well.
You kept the houses off my hill.
You saved my elm and tamarack.
You love this place, which loves you back.
Thank you for sixty years’ restraint
of urge to tidy up and paint,
to straighten rows or trim a tree.
Neatness doesn’t count to me.

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Historic Photo

Seventy-four years ago on July 30, 1950 Martha Crone made this Kodachrome showing part of the central hillside of the Upland Garden. Visible are a number of the large aluminum plant labels that Clinton Odell supplied for a number of years after WW II.