THANK YOU
Thank you to all who have supported The Friends in 2020 with your contributions, be they memberships, gifts or memorials. We cannot continue our support work for the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary without you.
Thank you to the Staff of the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board who were able to keep the Garden gate open this past season in spite of all the requirements placed on them by the pandemic.
The Friends support continues in 2021 as we begin in June our 70th year of Garden support. Details of what that support will be on this page.
Newsletter/Friends News
Current Issue of The Fringed Gentian™
Fall/Winter 2020
Newsletter archive - all back issues.
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A tale from 1911
Eloise Butler sets her hat on fire. Article.
The Maple Glen
How the Friends Invasive Plant Action Group has restored this habitat. Article.
Garden Plant of the Week
Selected from the many species in, or historical to, the Garden.
Slippery (Red) Elm
Ulmus rubra
Link on name goes to more information and photos of this plant.
A Seasonal Poem
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree~
Taken from Birches by
Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)
Reflections
“We of the machine age admire ourselves for our mechanical ingenuity; we harness cars to the solar energy impounded in carboniferous forests; we fly in mechanical birds; we make the ether carry our words or even our pictures. But are these not in one sense mere parlor tricks compared with our utter ineptitude in keeping land fit to live upon? Our engineering has attained the pearly gates of a near-millennium, but our applied biology still lives in nomad's tents in the stone age. If our system of land-use happens to be self-perpetuating, we stay. It it happens to be self-destructive we move, like Abraham, to pastures new.”
Aldo Leopold, 1933, from The Conservation Ethic
Garden theme items for sale
Downloadable PDF format books.
1907-1933. Companion book to The Wild Gardener
Martha Crone and the Wild Flower Garden
1933-1958. Companion book to the Crone History
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