To kick off a new year of staff, board and volunteer biographies (that’s right volunteers, I’m coming for you next) I interviewed Bryan Pynn, Metro Blooms’ director of design and planning services.  He wasn’t super keen on the idea of having his life chronicled on our blog at first, but after some time spent reviewing pictures of past trips, I think he really warmed up to the process.  Bryan has been with Metro Blooms since 2009 when he, and half of the landscape design class of 2010, was hired as a landscape design assistant.  But I’m getting too far ahead.  What I really want to tell you about is how Bryan met the pandas, learned some Mandarin, ALMOST became a policy expert and hung with Steve, the coolest herpetologist in Nicaragua.

Bryan studied natural resource policy at the U of MN as an undergrad and was able to go to China during his final year to study water quality and community participation. Enter pandas. After graduation Bryan just couldn’t get China off his mind so he went back to study Mandarin in order to get into a really cool environmental school in California to study policy. I hope you didn’t want to hear about the cool school, because Bryan ended up realizing his passion for landscape design and how it can incorporate stormwater management while he was studying Mandarin and decided to come back to the U of MN for a masters in landscape architecture.

After becoming a master at landscape architecture Bryan worked with BWSR and then thankfully ended up with Metro Blooms full time in 2010. Through Carol, a contact Bryan met on Metro Blooms’ Powderhorn project, he had the opportunity to travel to Nicaragua to survey her land and provide some recommendations for restoration.  This is where Bryan was lucky enough to meet Steve, a guy that raised really cool tropical frogs with the hopes of saving the wild ones.  After three weeks Bryan returned to Metro Blooms and is now a new homeowner with his wife Kate in Richfield where I hear there’s a sledding hill fit perfect for his son Jack, who is 6 months and 26 days today.