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Eloise Butler Eloise Butler, teacher, botanist, and Victorian plant hunter, founded the first public wildflower garden in the United States in 1907, the Wild Botanic Garden, which was later re-named in her honor to the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden. She curated the Garden until her death in 1933.

Early life, education and career
Born in 1851 in Appleton, Maine, Eloise was a studious girl who loved the outdoors. She taught school in West Appleton, Maine, and soon enrolled in a Teachers College, the Eastern State Normal School in Castine, Maine. She graduated in 1873, and moved to Indiana. In 1874, she moved to Minneapolis, MN, where she procured a teaching position at Central High School. She taught there for 30 years.

She devoted her life to the study of plants. Besides teaching botany, she attended classes at the University of Minnesota, collected plants, edited papers for college professors, and took botany trips to Jamaica, Woods Hole Massachusetts, and the University's research station on Vancouver Island. She discovered several species of desmids, two of which are named for her, Cosmarium eloiseanum and Staurastrum eloiseanum.

The Wild Botanic Garden
The idea for a plant reserve began with Eloise and a group of Minneapolis school teachers. They chose a tamarack bog in Glenwood Park (now Wirth Park), protected by hills on three sides, and drained by a small creek to the north. A petition, signed by the teachers and other notable Minneapolis residents, was prepared, stating the "desire to preserve intact all the wild and natural features ofthe place." The petition was approved in 1907, and the teachers immediately took a census of every species indigenous to the Garden. Eloise listed the plants by their Latin scientific names in her Garden Log.

Eloise spent the next 26 years planting, maintaining, leading tours, and writing about the Garden. In the fall, the Garden closed on September 30th, and she spent winters in Malden, Massachusetts, with her sister, Cora.

After her retirement from teaching in 1911, Eloise was appointed as the Garden Curator, providing her with a very small salary. Eloise wrote a weekly series of articles about the Garden for the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune in 1911. She also gave Garden tours. In 1910 and 1911 she hosted an exhibit about the Wild Botanic Garden at the horticulture building at the State Fair.

In 1929 the Park Board formally changed the name of the Native Plant Reserve to the Eloise Butler Wild Flower Garden in recognition of her achievement in "establishing in the garden as complete a collection of hardy plants as there is to be found anywhere in the great Northwest."

Eloise died in 1933 of a heart attack. She lived near the Garden, and walked there almost every day. On the afternoon of April 10, 1933, she collapsed near the spring on the eastern side of the Garden, where some workmen found her and brought her back to her home. She died a short while later.