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
March 2025
Drastic Monarch decline on West Coast
Handrails, Owls & Mud - then & now
Drastic Monarch decline on West Coast
Another bad year for the west coast Monarch population.
Winter counts are in for the 2024/2025 Western Monarch population that overwinters in coastal southern California, Northern Baja and inland sites in Arizona and the Saline Valley of California. There is a drastic decrease from the 2023/2024 season reported count of over 200,000 to just 9,119 monarchs. Yes, you are reading that correctly - there are no missing zeros.
You can see from the chart [©Xerces Society] how the population has declined since 1997 and more so from the estimated 1980s population of 4.5 million. The current years count is below what is generally considered the minimum for a sustainable population.
The situation of sites in Mexico for the much larger Eastern Monarch Population has not yet been reported. Our report last year shows the 2023/2024 chart for that area, where populations are measured not by butterfly numbers, but by area occupied. We will report when counts are available.
Below: Monarchs clinging to oyamel fir trees in the Sierre Chincua Sanctuary in Mexico. Photo ©Estela Romero.
Handrails, Owls & Mud - then & now
A few of the happenings in the Wildflower Garden from 50 years are noted here as comparison to this year:
The great horned owl.
The Great Horned Owls have been nesting successfully for a number of recent years [see our 2024 newsletter] and have been known in the Garden since Eloise Butler’s time. But there was a time period when they were elusive. Here is Gardener Ken Avery’s report from the spring of 1975:
Another thing that is happening is that the Great Horned Owl is busy having a family again. This may seem like a strange time to be sitting on a clutch of eggs but it is the time that the Great Horned Owl picks. I would think it would be a little uncomfortable, and I must say when I saw her half covered with snow she didn't have a terribly happy expression on her face; but she has no one to blame but herself. This is the third year in a row that we have been aware of the owl nesting in the area.
I have no way of knowing if one nested there for the last 20 years, but since we have found it for the last three years and never did before, I wonder if during those high D.D.T. years they did manage to nest or if we simply managed to miss it. You know that the eagles have been having better nesting success these last few years since the D.D.T. has become less prevalent in the environment.
Muddy paths
The next look-back comparison is a late 1990s photo of the path that leads from Wirth Beach toward the Garden entrance road with a branch to the back gate of the Garden. It always was as muddy in spring as the photo shows before the MPRB added a more solid level of gravel on top of it, but prior to 1975 that walking path did not exist. During the winter of 1974/1975 Park Board crews were working the boggy area just north of the Garden removing elms that had died of Dutch Elm Disease. Three of those were inside the Garden fence.
To access this area with heavy equipment they made a solid path by filling over the cut covering the water diversion pipeline that ran from the Wirth picnic grounds through the bog and then into south Wirth passing by Birch Pond. The pipeline was constructed in 1957 and ran from Bassett’s Creek to Brownie Lake and was to be used to add water to the Chain of Lakes when necessary. There are a few spots on this path today where the top of that 24 inch pipe is visible. The pipeline cut that is south of this boggy area, down to and around Birch Pond, was made a paved path in later years.
Handrails
Our third item for comparison is the stairs from the Garden parking lot to the Garden gate. These were put in place in 1972 following the construction of the Martha Crone Shelter, but without a handrail. The Friends made a request to the Park Board for a handrail in 1972 but it was not built until 1975 when the Friends provided some funding. It was touched up over the years but as most of you know it really fell apart over the last five years and in fall 2024 the MPRB carpenters with a teenage work group put up a new one. Replacing the steps will have to wait until a redesign project of the front area gets off the ground.
As we await the reopening of the Garden . . . .
Of all the early ephemeral spring flowers that we wait to see, surely the Hepatica is on everyone’s list. Furthermore, when the Garden opens one of the first blooms we should expect to see, if averages mean anything, is that of the Hepatica. The average bloom date used to April 17 and must now be trending earlier.
The small flowers have no petals but instead the 6 to 12 sepals are colored in shades of pure white to pinkish and even to bluish blush. They poke up early, just above their old dried dead leaves which have over-wintered. There are two species, different by leaf shape. "Sharp-lobed Hepatica" refers to the leaves with 3 deep lobes which are pointed on the ends of the lobes. Likewise the floral bracts have pointed tips. This compares to the "Round-lobed Hepatica" where the ends of the leaves are more rounded, as are the tips of the bracts.
Neither was present in this section of Glenwood Park that became the Wildflower Garden, so Eloise Butler imported them from various places around the cities and state. In her time a common name for the plant was “Liverwort” and the plants were placed in the “Crowfoot” family, which today is called the “Buttercup” family. Eloise wrote in 1911: “It seems somewhat incongruous to associate a name so musical and a flower so beautiful with anything so prosaic as the liver. Yet Hepatica is “liver” in Greek, and some herbalist, long ago, made the comparison, when he saw the three-lobed leaf.”
They appear in small clumps or groups of clumps along the paths of the Woodland Garden. Very photogenic.
Info sheet on Round-lobed Hepatica, Anemone americana and Sharp-lobed Hepatica, Anemone acutiloba
Wisdom is a Mother Again
Wisdom took up a new mate last year and the couple returned to Midway Atoll this winter where, at age 74, she laid an egg on December 3. The chick hatched in early February 2025. We first reported on Wisdom in January 2024.
Wisdom is a Laysan albatross and nests on Midway Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean. She is the oldest confirmed wild bird in the world and the oldest banded bird in the world, first banded in 1956 (band #Z333) when she laid an egg giving her at that time an estimated age of 5 years. Five years is the earliest age for sexual maturity in this species.
Below: Happy parents with the new egg: Wisdom (right) and mate, December 2024. Photo ©Dan Rapp, USFWS volunteer.
Did You Know . . .
Winter Lore
In the days before mechanical refrigeration people bought ice to keep perishables in their homes. If you lived in New York City in 1875 you bought Hudson Rive ice for between $15 and $30 for a ton which lasted a typical family 2 to 4 months. Only the well-off could afford that. The purchasing power of $30 back then requires $866 today.
Snowflakes were always thought to be pure crystals until 150 years ago when Gaston Tissandier found under high magnification that a single flake scavenged from the atmosphere such sundry stuff as sandy matter, starch, coal dust, cloth fragments, etc. Today the list of contaminants would probably much longer.
Historical Photos
A double feature this month.
March is notorious for snow. Our historical photo of March snow was taken March 25, 1933 by Minneapolis photographer E. F. Pabody who had a studio at 1920 Colfax Ave. So. Minneapolis. He visited Martha Crone at the Garden on occasion. His winter view of is of the pool at the north end of the Wildflower Garden, that was constructed in 1915 by Eloise Butler.
This must have been a favorite viewing spot for visitors as we have in our archives at least 4 views of this spot at different times of year. Compare Pabody’s photo with the late springtime image shot from a slightly different angle. That photo is from the May 1913 issue of The Bellman, which featured a descriptive article about Eloise Butler’s Garden. W. P. Kirkwood wrote "Here beside the pool one can easily imagine himself in the heart of a wilderness of almost limitless extent, hills and dense foliage so completely shut away the outer world. Indeed, here he can hardly believe anything else."
All selections published in 2025
All selections published in 2024
All selections published in 2023