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.
Kimberly Hess, a self-taught floral designer, will open Prairie Petals, specializing in Mason jar vases and native plants. Photo: Sarah Kolberg, for the Grand Forks Herald.
“’I don’t have to pay a cent for it,’ she said of her business model. ‘I don’t have to ship it from Chile. It wasn’t dry-packed a month ago.’” Her flower shop, set to open on NP Avenue in downtown Fargo, “will specialize in arrangements dominated by native flora, with dashes of cultivated flowers or anything else that she fancies — from unusual looking branches to onions gone to flower.”
This chart of temperatures, 1948-2005, shows that the median latest frost date in the spring is May 4, and median earliest frost in the fall is October 3 (of the NW Minnesota towns listed here, Ada is closest to Halstad, about 18 miles east). The stretch from October through April could be lean and very twiggy for Hess. But her attitude is quite the opposite: generous and robust.
“I want people to be able to buy something they haven’t seen anywhere else and be able to afford it,” said Hess. As a lover of Queen Anne’s lace, red clover and chicory (and a tightwad), we wish her resounding success.
Wish some of the plants were shown.
I have been using the purple seedless stalks of that new menace, garlic mustard, in bouquets and dry arrangement of sweet annie and sea oats. There are plenty of them as I cannot clear them everywhere.
I remember my mother making bouquets from “weeds” found along her walking routes.