Labarque Butterfly Garden

Frequenting at the LaBarque Creek Conservation Area, usually during my morning walks, I saw a small portion adjacent to the parking lot roped off for no reason I could see, and then dug up, and then planted, and now with a rustic bench wood-burned with the words of Don Robinson, the late industrialist who left 800 more acres of land, soon to become Don Robinson State Park, adjacent to the Area, for a total of about 1400 acres (or more) of protected LaBarque Creek watershed. It quotes him as calling it "an island of wilderness."

The Friends of the LaBarque Creek Watershed group got all this negotiated and done in the last 15 years, starting by partnering with the area's Missouri Stream Teams (which is how I got involved) to strategize, and then joining with the conservation people to save the cleanest, sweetest creek near St. Louis from an apartment complex development with 1100 units (I recollect the day I got the developer's letter in the mail, as one of the people who'd be living within 500 yards of the development) and a proposed hog farm that'd leak its runoff into the LaBarque. And they've done so many other things, from litter cleanup to fundraisers to save the LaBarque Creek Schoolhouse, closed in 1945 and still standing. And it was saved. Thank you.

Once you know this area, you love it forever.