Louise Hallberg, an internationally known expert on butterflies who turned her family home near Graton into a sanctuary for the colorful, fluttering creatures, has died.
Known simply as “the Butterfly Lady,” Hallberg was born a century ago in a family devoted to being stewards of land settled by her grandparents, both immigrants from Sweden.
She was a meticulous record keeper of everything in her garden that now constitutes the Hallberg Butterfly Gardens, which were incorporated as a nonprofit foundation in 1997.
She viewed butterflies as a key indicator species that foretold the future of changes in climate, plant and animal life.
“My main hope is that I can keep the gardens going as long as I’m here, and that the garden’s board of directors will keep it going after I am gone,” she said in one of her last interviews published by Sonoma Discoveries last August.
She was also a diligent recorder of the local weather, so much so that the National Weather Service bestowed a Jefferson Award on her in 1998 for her efforts to maintain the weather reporting station her father had operated since the 1910s.
Jim Schaefer, head of production for Sonoma West Times & News, recalled that he first met her 12 years ago when she called in the weather statistics for the Sebastopol area to him.
“I got a huge kick out of her from the very beginning. After she gave me the weather, she’d talk to me for about 15 or so minutes every Monday about what was going on in her garden,” Schaefer said. “I became so interested that I ended up visiting her on my own about a dozen times, and we walked together through her garden. She was fun to listen to as she talked so thoughtfully about wildlife. She was very concerned about the plight of the pollinators – the butterflies and the bees – and how climate change and overdevelopment was decimating the populations of these insects.”
She became one of the nation’s leading lepidopterist (specialist in moths and butterflies). Many schoolchildren and adults became familiar with her research through visits to the gardens or through videos or articles she produced.
She attended local schools, making her way to Analy High School by way of electric streetcar. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and later worked 35 years as registrar at the Santa Rosa Junior College.
