{"id":513,"date":"2014-04-02T10:00:54","date_gmt":"2014-04-02T15:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/historyapolis.com\/?p=513"},"modified":"2024-01-10T13:43:37","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T19:43:37","slug":"working-from-the-margins-eloise-butler-and-her-wildflower-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/2014\/04\/02\/working-from-the-margins-eloise-butler-and-her-wildflower-garden\/","title":{"rendered":"Working from the Margins: Eloise Butler and Her Wildflower Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Published April 2, 2014 by Sara Strozok<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Guest blogger today is Sara Strzok, <\/b>a medical writer and editor based in Minneapolis.<\/b><\/p>\n

Like so many women of her era, Eloise Butler (1851-1933) worked on the margins \u2013 in her case, both socially and geographically \u2013 to get what she wanted.\u00a0 In 1907, she joined the ranks of Minneapolis Park Board visionaries like Theodore Wirth<\/a> and Charles Loring when she saw the fruition of her plan to create and preserve the first wildflower garden in the nation. What\u2019s now called the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Native Bird Sanctuary<\/a>\u00a0 is a microcosm of Minnesota meadow, hills and bog flora at what was then the edge of town. Her teaching career and her campaign for this invaluable wild space at the margins of the city foreshadow the concerns of educators and environmentalists today.<\/p>\n

Though a keen and observant scientist who made significant contributions to the field of natural history (three species of algae she discovered are named in her honor), barriers common to women in academia at the time kept her from advanced training and a career as a research scientist.\u00a0 Instead, she supported herself through teaching. \u00a0As Butler pointed out in a brief autobiographical sketch, \u201cat that time and place no other career than teaching was thought of for a studious girl.\u201d A native of Maine, Butler was educated at teacher colleges in the east and moved west with her family to teach in Indiana.\u00a0 She moved on her own to Minneapolis when the well-paid teaching positions in modern, comfortable\u00a0 buildings advertised by the growing city appealed to her more than the onerous life of a one-room schoolhouse teacher. She taught at several schools, including Central and South high schools.<\/p>\n

During her 38-year career, she coped with the same issues that face Minneapolis educators today. Overcrowding forced schools to use stairwells as makeshift classrooms; school days were conducted in shifts while the school board debated building new facilities.\u00a0 Many of her students were immigrants who did not yet speak English.\u00a0 In her writings, Butler described her summer research trips to Jamaica, Woods Hole, and a short-lived University of Minnesota marine research center on Vancouver Island as bright spots in the round of drudgery that was teaching. She put the \u201csounds of the schoolroom\u201d at the top of a list titled \u201cMy Hates\u201d and noted that \u201cIn my next incarnation I shall not be a teacher.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite this problematic relationship with her career, Butler was a popular, effective and influential science teacher. She was passionate about connecting children to nature in a way that foreshadows the current farm to fork trend in education of groups like Youth Farm<\/a>, which cultivates summer gardening programs for children. Butler judged the summer garden she ran at Rosedale Elementary School (43rd<\/sup> Street and Wentworth Avenue) a success when children told her that their harvest \u201ctasted much nicer than any that could be bought of the grocer.\u201d Butler advocated for greenhouses connected to schools (a dream realized at Central High School\u2019s new building after her retirement) and for her wild garden, saying, \u201cknowledge of the soil and its products \u2026 would do much toward shielding young people from the temptations of artificial and unhealthful amusements of city life and lead them back to nature where the mind and body could develop in a healthful and sane way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though Butler used typically feminine modesty and language in her campaign for the wildflower garden (all work done at the garden by female botany teachers was conducted, of course, \u201cunder the direction\u201d of park work men), she was opinionated and uncompromising in her advocacy for saving wild spaces from thoughtless development, using language that sounds familiar to us today.\u00a0 In fact, she objected to the term \u201cwildflower garden,\u201d preferring instead \u201cnative plant reserve.\u201d Her screed against suburban gardeners could come from today\u2019s headlines about battles between environmentalists and lawn-proud lake dwellers:<\/p>\n

Cottagers on the suburban lakes have fettered ideas of planting that are more appropriate for city grounds, and condemn their neighbors, for a lack of neatness in not using a lawn mower \u2026 apparently dissatisfied until the wilderness is reduced to a dead level of monotonous, songless tameness.<\/p>\n

When she retired from teaching, the Minneapolis Park Board hired as the first curator of the native plant reserve she founded at a salary of $50 per month, less than most groundskeepers made. She held this position until her death in 1933. She described these retirement years as the most professionally fulfilling of her life \u2013 but again, most of her work was done on the margins of the professional research world. She paid out of her own pocket to fence the grounds to protect specimens from collectors and vandals.\u00a0 She was unable to get University of Minnesota sponsorship and funding for the truly groundbreaking collection of native plants she curated because she lacked professional credentials.\u00a0 Instead, she relied on her own efforts and those of her friends and fellow amateur botanists. While it has less biodiversity than in Butler\u2019s time, the garden still hosts more than 500 plant species and 130 bird species in woodland, wetland and prairie areas<\/p>\n

At my last visit to the wildflower garden, I found myself ruefully wondering how different the landscape of Minneapolis might look if Eloise Butler had a professional scientific career, instead of exercising her passion on the margins.\u00a0 Would this garden exist?<\/p>\n

Material from this post is taken from the Friends of Eloise Butler website; M. E. Hellander, The Wild Gardener: the life and selected writings of Eloise Butler; <\/i>and E Butler, “Back to Nature: A little patch of God’s creations in connection with school studies,” The Labor Digest<\/i> (1908).<\/p>\n

The photo shows Eloise on her 80th birthday with a group of friends. It is from the Hennepin County Libraries Special Collections.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Published April 2, 2014 by Sara Strozok Guest blogger today is Sara Strzok, a medical writer and editor based in Minneapolis. Like so many women of her era, Eloise Butler (1851-1933) worked on the margins \u2013 in her case, both socially and geographically \u2013 to get what she wanted.\u00a0 In 1907, she joined the ranks…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":496,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[55,60,155,194],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4120,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513\/revisions\/4120"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mvt.rpw.mybluehost.me\/.website_3d6664ec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}