This post was written by Naomi Sachs, a landscape designer and Founding Director of the Therapeutic Landscapes Network. Many people talk about the restorative benefits of gardening and the reasons… Read More →
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… Read More →
Last Wednesday Metro Blooms’ Rock for Raingardens event took place at the Fine Line Cafe in downtown Minneapolis. Metro Blooms board members and staff, friends of the bands, landscape design… Read More →
Metro Blooms with Sentyrz Supermarket on WCCO 4 News, 4/18/2012 N. MPLS–Lead Landscape Designer Michael Keenan recently spoke for Metro Blooms on WCCO News. Michael highlighted the Sentyrz Supermarket raingarden… Read More →
Metro Blooms’ Lead Landscape Designer delivers raingarden wisdom during a WCCO interview at Sentyrz Supermarket in NE Mpls (aired on 4/18/2012)
Yesterday was the long awaited Give to the Max Day, and oh what a memorable day it was! The entire 24-hour donation window raised about $13.5 million for hundreds of Minnesota… Read More →
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — Metro Blooms is pleased to announce that John Kinara has been appointed Chair of the Board of Directors of Metro Blooms. Kinara, formerly Vice-Chair, takes on the leadership role from Carol Kuechler, who will continue to serve as a Board member. “This is a very proud moment for me, stepping into the…
Mission Metro Blooms partners with communities to create resilient landscapes and foster clean watersheds, embracing the values of equity and inclusion to solve environmental challenges.
We are planting “seeds” for future pollinator gardens within our communities. Working with the nonprofit Wilderness in the City, we’re installing six pollinator-friendly demonstration gardens in parks across the Twin Cities. We hope to inspire park visitors to take home ideas for incorporating native plants into their outdoor spaces. Each garden features all Minnesota-native plants…
Drive along Brooklyn Boulevard in Brooklyn Park, and you’ll pass a typical sprawling parking lot for a shopping center. But look a little closer, and you’ll see something different about the green strip bordering the road. Amidst the typical turfgrass, cheerful clumps of native grasses and flowers beckon visitors, plantings arranged in gently curving beds…
Community Coffee Chat May 7 Creating pollinator habitat wherever you live: Join Metro Blooms and Monarch Joint Venture to learn about what you can do to help pollinators thrive. Tuesday, May 7 8:30–9:00am OR 6:30—7pm on Zoom Learn more
The green economy is growing, providing well-paying jobs and education opportunities to people interested in beautifying and protecting the environment. Below you’ll find a variety of career and learning resources, many of them for youth and young adults, to help you get started researching opportunities.
This past summer, we teamed up with neighborhoods, cities, and the Conservation Corps of Minnesota & Iowa (CCM) to install raingardens in residents’ yards and teach them about sustainable landscaping practices along the way. These efforts were part of our Neighborhood of Raingardens program, which aims to make clean-water planting projects easier and more affordable…
Metro Blooms Design + Build, a for-profit entity that supports the Metro Blooms non-profit, provides high-quality, resilient, and sustainable landcare services for residential and commercial landscapes. To see examples of… Read More →
Pollinators play an essential role in Minnesota’s ecosystems. They help plants reproduce; healthy plant populations provide food and habitat to other wildlife and help to clean air and water. Pollinators sustain a healthy, diverse, functioning ecosystem. Without biodiversity, our ecosystem would fail. This is happening today. Increased human activity, pollutants, homogenization of landscapes, and other…
2022 Environmental Initiative Award, Local Sustainability Impacts, for Brook Gardens: Clean Water + Livability, a multi-partner project engaging a rental community on co-creation of more resilient landscapes 2022 Environmental Excellence Award, Minnesota Erosion Control Association 2021 Summer Blossom Award, Grand Neighborhood Garden, City of Brooklyn Park, for our work engaging rental communities on co-creation of…
A pollinator garden on 38th Street and Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis, steps from our office, is a garden for all seasons. At the height of the summer, there are blooming coneflowers and black-eyed Susans. Right now the garden is blanketed in white, the coneflowers covered with snow hats. It’s the perfect backdrop for viewing the…
The more nature, the better, for Ben Swarts. A couple of years ago, when he moved his business, Hardshell Fitness, into a former gas station on 38th Street at Longfellow, Swarts “threw” some seeds down behind the building. Today that space is a beautiful wildflower garden. Now he looks at the gray expanse of paved…
Bendu Kollie wants to learn as much as she can about the plants growing in her church’s raingarden. Her church community, All Nations Seventh-Day Adventist Church, planted it in August with the help of Metro Blooms in a landscape renovation to manage stormwater and help pollinators. She hopes it plants seeds of stewardship among the…
Metro Blooms grew out of a volunteer-powered garden recognition program, the Minneapolis Garden Awards program, which was first established by the City of Minneapolis’ Committee on the Urban Environment (CUE). Between 1979 and 2016, hundreds of trained volunteer evaluators visited thousands of gardens, every year recognizing and celebrating excellence, and inspiring a proud culture of…
We have adjusted our work to pandemic times, experiencing challenges but also opportunities. Here’s an update on Autumn Ridge Apartments in Brooklyn Park.
One thing interns are sure to learn about at Metro Blooms is raingardens. This summer we hosted Althea Kuzniewski, an environmental studies major at the University of Minnesota. Althea came to us through the U’s Institute on the Environment, in an internship supported by Ecolab. She had the job of visiting and assessing raingardens we…
Residents and other community members helped us plant this raingarden at Riverside Plaza on June 18, 2019. This video, by Yordanose Solomone, Metro Blooms Equitable Engagement Manager, celebrates the raingarden’s first birthday and features a song written for it by Riverside composer Ardo Muse and singer Abdihakiin Aden Farrah.* It may be the first raingarden…
Who We Are Metro Blooms is a nonprofit that partners with communities to create resilient landscapes and foster clean watersheds, embracing the values of equity and inclusion to solve environmental challenges. We believe that collaboration with community is the most impactful way to heal our earth and we strive to center relationships in all that…
