Beauty and the heat: Minnesota State Fair garden crews bring the green
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The Minnesota State Fair is about more than fried food, costumed llamas and giant slides. Tucked in front of buildings, in giant pots along the midway, under the Skyride and forming walls of green to direct foot traffic are dozens of gardens.
Delivering that beauty requires 100 crew members, a fleet of water trucks and greenhouses filled with canna lilies along with months of planning to make sure the fair’s 60 gardens are watered, green and bursting with flowers in time for the Great Minnesota Get-Together.
“For the greenhouse department in particular, (the fair is) like the culmination of all of our hard work for somewhere between nine and 10 months,” said State Fair horticultural manager Mindy Walter. “It has a sense of ‘OK, we’re at the end, we’re at the finish line,’ It can be a very relaxing moment for us.”
Walter’s team starts their labor in the fall when they unearth 4,500 of the fair’s distinctive canna lily bulbs and transfer them to the basement of the historic J.V. Bailey House to overwinter.
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The cannas have a long history at the fair, though Walter has often puzzled over why the tropical plants with their tall stalks, structural leaves and fire-red blooms were chosen to decorate the grounds of a Midwest festival.
Her theory is that, because the plants multiply and create their own bulbs, they were an affordable option for filling huge amounts of land. They also bloom at the end of August.
“They put on their most spectacular display right around the time of the fair, so they are their biggest, their boldest, their most beautiful,” Walter said.
“They love the heat. They love the sun, and they will get anywhere from 5 feet tall to I’ve seen them as much as 10 feet tall, and they will prolifically flower with very minimal deadheading all through the 12 days of the fair and beyond.”
‘Labor of love’
Maintaining the canna lilies is a fraction of the work Walter and her crew of more than 100 – including 14 year-round-staff are responsible. They grow plants from seed to populate the Little Farm Hands exhibit. They also start thousands of annuals in the fair’s greenhouse. Other plants are ordered and shipped to the fair as small plugs.
Among the fair’s historic displays, the Liberty Bell on the east side of the agriculture building stands out. It’s constructed with a 3D metal grid that takes 1,000 plants to fill and 300 hours to finish.
Walter called the work a “labor of love” for the staff.
“I have seen people that come to the fairgrounds specifically to take their family photos every year, or their wedding anniversary photos, and there will be people with picture books that literally have four decades worth of photos of their family in front of that space, and it sort of brings a tear to your eye, right?” Walter said.
None of the State Fair gardens or lawns are irrigated. Walter and her crew do everything by hand with the help of a 2500-gallon water truck to keep things green through the summer.
Walter’s favorite garden is located at the International Bazaar and includes a collection of palm trees that over winter in the fair greenhouses. For those interested in viewing those and other highlights of the fair’s 60 gardens, there is an online guide.
Walter said the best time to view the fair gardens is right after the gates open on the first day, before more than 1 million people descend on the lawns.
“We do tell all of our family members, if you're going to come and enjoy our work that we've created throughout the year, come on Day 1,” Walter said.
