Brainerd Garden Club celebrates 100th anniversary with help from Northland Arboretum – Brainerd Dispatch

BAXTER – The Brainerd Garden Club celebrated its 100th anniversary at the Northland Arboretum on Wednesday, June 19 with an open house and tour of the pollinator garden.

Garden club members bustled around in bright green embroidered polo shirts, some manning booths offering crocheted flowers or free swamp milkweed sprouts and informational brochures. The shirts are a new addition to their 100th anniversary wardrobe, and they will wear them again when they march in the Fourth of July parade, according to Jackie Burkey.

Burkey, the current club president and granddaughter of the club’s third president, said the garden club had only 12 members when she joined, but that number has now more than doubled.

“We had some members who lived to be 100,” Burkey said. “So I said, ‘Join the garden club, you’ll live to be 100!'”

The club has been active in the Brainerd and Baxter communities in many ways over the past 100 years, including helping the Northland Arboretum achieve nonprofit status in 1972, according to a post on the arboretum’s Facebook page.

The society was originally founded in June 1924 as the Crow Wing Garden Flower Society, the name was changed to the Brainerd Flower Society in 1950, and it adopted its current name in 1974, according to an article in the Lake Country Journal.

In 1963, the city of Brainerd vowed to become the “flowering crabapple capital of Minnesota,” so the garden club sold 300 flowering crabapple trees, which can now be seen in numerous parks and gardens in the community, according to the Lake Country Journal. To celebrate the anniversary, Burkey said, the club has now donated more trees to local churches and schools.

Another garden club member – Jackie Froemming – said the club’s mission is to beautify the city. Froemming also said the club has a real strength in education, a sentiment shared by club members Mary Anderson and Karina Peterson.

In keeping with the educational spirit, the open house included a tour of the pollinator garden led by DeAnn Bradley.

Steve Kohls / Brainerd Dispatch

The tour took participants through the arboretum’s grounds to the Gazebo Garden, a portion of which is devoted exclusively to plants frequented by native pollinators. Pollinators can be bees, butterflies, wasps, flies, birds, or even bats, and many of them cannot survive without the native plants of their area.

“If you’re going to start a pollinator garden, that’s fantastic. I highly recommend you do that because our pollinators need more food,” Bradley said. “But make sure you go online and check the plants you’re looking at to make sure they’re not invasive or spreading everywhere and taking over everything.”

Steve Johnson, a master gardener who helps maintain the Gazebo Garden, said milkweed is especially important for monarch butterflies. While monarch butterflies prefer to lay their eggs on common milkweed, they look to swamp milkweed for nectar.

The Minnesota Landscape Arboretum advises gardeners who want to support pollinators to plant native flowers, shrubs and trees that offer pollen and nectar, choose a wide variety of plants with different bloom times, make their lawns more bee-friendly with low-growing flowers and reduce or eliminate the use of pesticides.

Caroline Julstrom, intern, can be reached at 218-855-5851 or [email protected].

Caroline Julstrom completed her sophomore year at the University of Minnesota in May 2024 and began working as a summer intern at the Brainerd Dispatch in June.