Ron Bowen walked through his new store's sale yard in Scandia, stopping often to point out different prairie plants - and struggling to rank them against each other.
"I can't pick a favorite," said Bowen, who has been credited with helping bring back native Minnesota prairies since the 1970s. "Prairie phlox is a great addition to any planting.
"That's a little lobelia," he said, strolling ahead. "This is alum root. It's a great plant. And, oh, blazing star like these are fabulous plants. It's a wonderful plant for monarch butterflies. It's just the best."
Bowen's passion for prairies has been a full-time job since 1977, when he founded Prairie Restorations Inc., which today employs 102 people and operates six service centers, three production centers and two retail stores.
The Scandia store is the company's largest and aims to serve the northeast Twin Cities, offering 154 native species of wildflowers and trees, shrubs, grasses and seed mixes. For an "instant prairie," the store sells sod flats consisting of 2 square feet of established grasses and wildflowers. Bowen is using some of those sod flats to create a prairie outside Prairie Restorations' front door.
The store and its prairie landscape are natural fits for Scandia, a city known for its rural character, said Dolores Peterson, a Scandia City Council member.
"It's an asset for the community," Peterson said. "He did such a great job with everything. The building is just beautiful - both inside and out."
The store's opening convinced the city's Swedish museum, Gammelgarden, to restore its own prairie. Lynne Blomstrand Moratzka, the museum's director, called it a "happy coincidence."
"We needed to redo it, and now look who's in town," Blomstrand Moratzka said. "It all worked out."
Now 60, Bowen was a sophomore forestry major at the University of Minnesota when he answered an ad for a gardener in the Minnesota Daily, the campus newspaper. The ad had been placed by then-Dayton-Hudson chief executive Bruce Dayton, who hired Bowen to care for his 150-acre Long Lake estate - work Bowen did for 10 years.
"Bruce basically gave me free rein," said Bowen, who lives in Dayton, Minn. "I learned a lot about nature and plants in those years."
Dayton's mother, Grace, instilled in Bowen a love of native plants. "She'd drive up (to northern Minnesota) and scavenge plants and bring them back," Bowen said. "My work really goes back, in many ways, to Grace."
Bowen convinced Bruce Dayton to build a greenhouse, and he began collecting and growing wildflower seeds on site. After the two visited Glacier National Park in Montana, Bowen talked Dayton into letting him turn the estate's front field into a prairie. Bowen said it was one of the first planted prairies in Minnesota.
"It was a very easy sell," Bowen said. "But there weren't people or resources I could turn to and say, 'How do I do this?' There weren't resources we could just buy."
Looking around the Scandia store's inventory, Bowen said some of the seed mixes for sale were "20 years in the making."
"People today starting prairies have a great advantage over what I had 40 years ago," he said. "I had to pretty much create and invent this stuff."Pioneer Press
