Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden Entrance Renovation Creating and Enhancing the Entry into Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden

Milestones (anticipated project schedule by month/season)

Summer 2025: Initial project scoping
Summer 2025: Community engagement with stakeholder and residents
Fall 2025: Determination of priority improvements for current funding
Winter 2025- Spring 2026: Construction Documentation and Bidding
Summer 2026: Construction

Park Background

Name: The park was named Theodore Wirth Park on September 7, 1938. When the first 64 acres were acquired for the park in 1889 it was named Saratoga Park. The name was changed to Glenwood Park on December 27, 1890. When the park was expanded to include Keegan’s Lake in 1909, the board designated the name Glenwood Park for the new grounds and officially changed the name of the lake to Glenwood Lake. The park, parkway and lake were all renamed for Wirth in 1938.

Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden

As demand for the expansion of Glenwood Park grew, a new development gave the park one of its signature features, a unique wildflower garden that is cherished still. In early 1907 Eloise Butler, John Greer and others petitioned the park board for space in Glenwood Park to establish a botanical garden. The park board granted the request and set aside three acres of bog, meadow and hillside for the Wild Botanical Garden, the first public wildflower garden in the United States. The board also allocated a modest sum for paths and fencing of the area and on April 27, 1907 announced that the garden had opened.

The person who took charge of the garden as a volunteer was a retired botany teacher, Eloise Butler, who for years had taken her students to the park for botany lessons. Butler tended the garden for four years as a volunteer until in 1911 the Minneapolis Woman’s Club petitioned the park board to appoint a full-time curator for the garden. The club offered to pay half a year’s salary for a curator. When that wasn’t enough to get the park board to act, the club increased the offer to a full year’s salary if the park board would retain the position and pay the salary after that. The park board agreed. The person the Woman’s Club recommended to be the curator was Eloise Butler.

Eloise Butler created such a magnificent wild garden—collecting, protecting, preserving and cataloguing wild plants and offering free botany classes—that the park board named the garden in her honor in 1929. In 1933, at the age of 81, she died on her way to work. Her ashes were spread in her garden and the park board held a memorial service and planted a pin oak tree in the garden in her honor, noting that “Every plant in her garden was her living child, upon whom she bestowed her devotion and care.”

Butler was succeeded by her assistant, Martha Crone, who remained in charge of the garden until 1959. Upon Crone’s retirement, she was succeeded by Ken Avery. The shelter in the garden is named for Crone and the terrace is named for Avery.

An important addition to the park occurred in 1944, when Clinton O’Dell, a successful Minneapolis businessman—he created the Burma Shave rhymes seen along highways — and former botany student of Eloise Butler, contributed $3,000 to expand the garden to include ground for upland or prairie varieties of plants, rather than the primarily woodland plants that Butler’s original garden could accommodate. O’Dell also helped form in 1951 The Friends of the Wild Flower Garden, which has contributed time and money for the maintenance and improvement of the garden ever since.

Project History

The Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden Renovation Project will build upon the vision outlined with the 2015-approved Theodore Wirth Regional Park Plan. This project will also follow guidance by the 2022 community findings that were developed and recommendations at that time.

The Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden Entrance Renovation Project looks to renovate and reimage the entrance into the wildflower garden. This project will look towards ways to improve the entry experience and access from the beginning as soon as you exit off Theodore Wirth Parkway all the way until you enter through the garden gates.

Funding

Met Council: $600,000

Total $600,000 secured