Edna Walker and her friend and classmate Zulma Steele came to the Byrdcliffe Arts & Crafts Colony in 1903 at the recommendation of Arthur Wesley Dow, their teacher at the Pratt Institute in New York City. Working together, they produced many designs for decorations to be transferred to Byrdcliffe furniture.

This rendering of a branch from a tulip poplar tree was adapted for use on two large cabinets (Huntington Art Collections and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Although the decorations on one cabinet vary slightly from those on the other, both derive from this naturalistic drawing.

More important pieces of Byrdcliffe furniture can be attributed to Walker than to Steele yet much less is known about the former than the latter. This is perhaps because Steele left Byrdcliffe and became a well-known painter who lived in a house she and her husband built near Woodstock until she died in 1979. Walker, who evidently maintained a studio at Steele’s home after Steele’s husband died in 1928, became the director of weaving at Herter Looms in New York City and later moved to Scotland.