Friends of the Wildflower Garden
These short articles are written to highlight the connections of the plants, history and lore of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden with different time frames or outside connections. A web of present and past events
June 2025
Eloise Butler's summer plant review
The first Wildflower Garden visitor handout
Controlling spread from early bloomers
A milkweed for shady areas
In last month's article about 10 native wildflowers for shady areas (Native summer wild flowers for a shady area) we highlighted the only milkweed in the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden that you will find in a shady area.
This tall perennial has one other difference - the inflorescence is composed of several drooping umbels, arising from the top of the stem, which each have only a few long stalked flowers. The appear like a cluster of falling stars from a fireworks display. Most other milkweed species have dense upward facing umbels of flowers. Yet, the flowers have all the structure of a milkweed flower, but facing downward instead of upward. The seed pod however forms on a curved stalk and is held erect like other milkweeds.
The colors are more subdued as you may expect in a shady area plant - whites, light greens and pale purples. The plant is indigenous to the Wildflower Garden but Minnesota is at the NW edge of the plants range in North America. You will only find it in the wild on the eastern side of the state in the wooded counties. The strange name of "poke" is an instance of avoiding being original in the naming of a plant by referring to another plant that has a similar characteristic, in this case the leaves, which look like those of American Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) which is a poisonous plant of eastern North America not found in Minnesota.
Link to our information sheet on Poke Milkweed.
Eloise Butler's summer plant review.
One hundred fourteen years after she wrote her 1911 newspaper columns, Eloise Butler's review of summer plants is still as valid as the day it was written.
From April through September 1911 Eloise wrote a column each week for the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune. She used the column to educate, criticize, advocate for the Wildflower Garden and sometimes to advertise garden tours.
Here is just a sampling of bits from several columns in summer:
On June 18 she reviews the six cypripediums that are native to Minnesota including the "greatest prize of the swamp" the Showy Lady's Slipper. Also mentioned are the twayblades of which the Wide-lipped, Liparis liliifolia, was recently rediscovered in the Wildflower Garden.
On July 2 she quotes Longfellow when writing about Blue Flag and then gets into what is a weed?
On July 9 she revels the intricacy of the milkweed flower and then how the waterlily reflects Goethe’s theory that all the parts of a flower are modified leaves.
On July 16 in reviewing the Silphiums, she discusses polarity in leaves and then add this criticism:
"Why, for instance, because a neighbor has a beautiful plant on his premises should every one in the vicinity straightway fill his grounds with the same in monotonous reiteration?"
On July 23 she writes of the themes people have for gardens as a lead in to the Wild Bergamot about which "Abundant as it is, we are never ready to cry 'Hold! Enough!' For, besides its delicate perfume, it delights the eye as well." Then she covers a list of prairie plants.
The link goes to our archive page listing links to all the 1911 columns. Each article is rewritten in web format, color illustrated, with a printable copy and a pdf of the original text.
Clovers of the prairie
Eloise Butler called them the soldiers of the prairies: "Regiments of clover hussars bivouac on the prairies with shakos of violet red or of white. Three species respond to muster roll in Minnesota. All are armed with very slender leaf blades and all reek a pungent odor."
She was referring to the Petalostemum genus, later reclassified to the Dalea genus. These are the Purple Prairie Clover (Dalea purpurea), the White Prairie Clover (Dalea candida) and the Silky Prairie Clover (Dalea villosa). There are actually four in this group that are native, but she was not wrong. She was only referring to the Petalsostemums, the fourth one, the Foxtail Prairie Clover (Dalea leporina) was already in the genus Dalea in her day.
By 1914 Eloise had all four in the Wildflower Garden. All are members of the Pea family and have similar characteristics: Pinnately compound leaves, flowers on an elongated cone-like spike, deep roots, nitrogen fixing and attractive to butterflies and bees, making them a good choice for a pollinator garden that is not overly moist.
Medicinal uses have also been described for the plants in the writings of, among others, Frances Densmore and Meriwether Lewis. Both mention a medicinal tea made from the roots.
When planting them outside of their native prairie environment, take care that they are not crowded out by more aggressive species not found in their native prairie habitat. Perhaps we should state that rabbits are somewhat fond of the leaves.
Another set of prairie clovers are the bush clovers of the genus Lespedeza. These are taller plants that bloom later in summer, still in the pea family but can have two different types of flowers - those that open and set seed and those that remain closed and still set seed. Only two are found in Minnesota, the Round-headed Bush Clover Lespedeza capitata, and the Prairie Bush Clover Lespedeza leptostachya, the latter is a Minnesota rare plant and has never been in the Wildflower Garden.
Links to two information sheets:
Round-headed Bush Clover.
The first Wildflower Garden visitor handout
Seventy five years ago Garden Curator Martha Crone, after years of requests from visitors, introduced a descriptive brochure about the Garden. Today, visitors expect brochures and take-homes. Martha wrote in 1950:
The mimeographed brochure proved a great success and filled a much needed want.
The six-page brochure described the Garden paths and trails and included a hand-drawn map of the Garden layout. This map is important historically as it indicates the layout of paths and trails at that time, which were different from Eloise Butler's time and different from today.
For the curious, the reason why the back page had a drawing of Dayton's Department Store is that Donald Dayton, president of Daytons and a founding director of the Friends of the Wildflower Garden, paid for the printing.
Earlier in the year, the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune ran a full color page featuring ten seasonal plants of the Garden. Yes, that is Purple Loosestrife illustrated growing around Birch Pond, one of the ten seasonal flowers. Back in 1950 its wetland and shoreline devastation was not yet recognized. [Photo of Birch Pond with Loosestrife taken by Martha Crone Aug. 5 1950]
Below: The May 21 1950 Minneapolis Sunday Tribune article on the Wildflower Garden. [Link -larger image.]
Controlling spread from early blooms
Some of our early blooming wild flowers tend to spread seed that aggressively spreads the plant, to the extent that your garden may be choked with some of these species.
If you plant a native wildflower garden or pollinator garden you will soon have issues with some of the plants that are growing outside of their native environment where they would be more controlled by the local habitat and surrounding species.
We point out three spring blooming species that you may wish to take action on. Action would be to cut off the seed heads before they mature and the seeds drop. Three species particularly good at spreading new plants are:
Golden Alexander (Zizia aurea,
White Avens (Geum canadense),
and Aniseroot (Long-styled Sweet Cicily - Osmorhiza longistylis).
An early summer bloomer that spreads aggressively by root is Canada Anemone (Anemone canadensis). One can only pull new growth that spreads too far.
Later in the season, the same root spread can be said for certain sunflowers - common sunflower, Maximillians Sunflower. Big-leaf (large-leaved) aster (Eurybia macrophylla) has an aggressive rhizsomatus root system that can make a ground cover of big leaves if that is what you want, but there are few flower stems as the species produces many sterile plants. You may wish to avoid this plant entirely. Short's Aster spreads aggressively by seed.
Historical Photo
A massed bed of Bird's foot violets photographed by Martha Crone on June 2, 1950 in the upland garden area. Seventy five years later, you may spot one or so of these violets in the upland but the concept of massed beds of the same plant was short-lived during Martha Crone's tenure. It did not fit the idea of a naturalistic habitat which is the Wildflower Garden's basic premise.
*Photo note: Photos with a “CC” credit are used for educational purposes under Creative Commons license. Learn about this at https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/
All selections published in 2025
All selections published in 2024
All selections published in 2023