Urban Artistry

Ron Bowen, Prairie Restoration‘s founder, restores native prairie in unusual places. Bowen’s artistry is evident in plantings he created for State Farm’s headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota. In the traditional corporate arrangement, more conventional landscaping and turf grass would be what casual visitors would see. At State Farm, employees and visitors are greeted at the front door by a splash of vivid colors rather than the usual manicured and somber corporate greens. Prairie Restorations created the 45-acre plot of prairie for the company several years ago as a demonstration.

“There’s no way you’d go into there without saying Wow!,” Ron Bowen, Prairie Restoration’s founder, says. “It’s very full of flowers and very beautiful. There are lots of blue and purple tones, a lot of yellow. It’s very diverse.”

The corporation saved a quarter of a million dollars by planting 45 acres of native prairie species rather than turf grass. Over the first 10 years of the plantings existence, the prairie, which contains approximately 70 plant species, will save another quarter million in maintenance costs. What little maintenance is needed is often performed by Prairie Restoration crews. Fire is the principle management tool with a little chemical and mechanical weed control utilized early in the plantings’ life. “We set up five management zones there and we burn them alternately over 3-year periods and then we start over again. We use fire to manage quite a few urban sites,” Ron says.

Seeds of a Revolution

The seeds for creating fields of native plants or, in the case of numerous jobs Ron has done for The Nature Conservancy, actually restoring native prairie to something like its former glorious diversity, were planted in him when he was a child. Around age six, Ron’s parents moved to the suburban fringes of St. Paul, Minnesota. “Over the next two or three years I saw… woods get cut down,… streams get put into culverts and farm fields turned into lots for houses. I felt there was something wrong,” Ron recalls.

Ron’s love for the wild and outdoors led him to attend the University of Minnesota’s forestry school. Instead of cruising timber stands for International Paper after college, however, he ended up taking care of Senator Mark Dayton’s father’s wildflower gardens. Mark’s grandmother, Grace, had been an avid wildflower gardener in the 1930s and 1940s, explains Ron, and her love for the beauty of wildflowers had rubbed off on her son, Bruce.

“He knew a lot about wildflowers,’ Ron says. “Under Bruce I had quite a bit of free rein. I was able to get a greenhouse and learn how to grow plants and how to manage seed a little bit and how to do some early restoration work.” Following a 10-year mentorship under Dayton, during which his confidence and reputation grew, Bowen set out on his own. Twenty years ago, establishing a private business to restore prairie landscapes was a revolutionary idea.

“Seed production farms take many years,” Ron says. Bowen collected his first big bluestem grass seed from an abandoned railroad right-of-way. “A lot of times you might start with as little as a lunch bag of seed. You take that lunch bag of seed,” Ron says, “and you grow it in a greenhouse to get the maximum number of seeds. “Then you hand plant those in a row somewhere and they mature-that can take up to three years. Then you collect that seed and maybe you have a few garbage bags of seed and you can plant that. By the end of 5-7 years you’ve got maybe 20-30 acres planted and you’re ready for commercial production.”

Dakota Winds Blow

Now Prairie Restoration performs prairie, wetland, and hardwood forest plantings and restorations. Besides its Princeton greenhouses and retail store, the company has 10 acres of woodlands near Princeton for seed collection from species like trillium and wild geranium and a 500-acre seed production farm adjacent to the Nature Conservancy’s Bluestem Prairie in Clay County in western Minnesota.

Prairie Restorations planted its first big bluestem field in western Minnesota, at the Big Bluestem Farm, in 1991. They harvested 4,000 pounds of seed during the fall of 2000. That’s enough seed to plant 400 acres. That is 4,000 pounds of big bluestem, along with Indian grass seed, prairie drop seed, numerous prairie flowers, little blue stem, and side oats grama seed will assure that the Dakota winds will continue to blow across native prairie plants in the Red River Valley and eastern North Dakota for some time to come.