Human Flower Project
Orrington, MAINE USA
Murrieta, CALIFORNIA USA
Princeton, MAINE USA
Thursday, July 08, 2010
A Florist with Prairie Aesthetics
Combining the grow-local ethic with a fondness for rangeland plants, Kimberly Hess will let Mother Nature handle inventory for her flower shop.
Kimberly Hess uses curly dock, a prairie wildflower, in arrangements. Her shop, soon to open in Fargo, ND, will feature the region’s wild plants, homegrown on her farm.
Photo: Sarah Kolberg, for the Grand Forks Herald
It’s a long way from the world’s renowned flower-growing regions—Lisse in the Netherlands or Medellin, Colombia—to Halstad, Minnesota. Nobody told Kimberly Hess that, though. She’s planning to open a flower shop in nearby Fargo, North Dakota, using the grasses and wildflowers that grow at her farm along the Red River.
Tu-Uyen Tran of the Grand Forks Herald wrote a fine feature story about Hess and her plans for Prairie Petals.
Halstad, pop. 622, is in far western Minnesota, a farming community settled by Norwegian immigrants. In fields of her own 150-acres and ditches through the surrounding countryside, Hess finds wild hemlock, sedge and lead plants, along with “purple prairie clovers and the violet flowers of the vervains, ignored or unseen by drivers roaring by on the asphalt.