Keeping the tradition of flower baskets alive

This past fall, Downtown Red Wing unveiled a new slogan: “Hand crafted, nature inspired.” No part of Red Wing fits that definition more than the town’s flower baskets.

Those baskets, which hang in both downtown and the West End, have been planted by Sargent’s Nursery at the end of March every year since 1990.

The baskets (which followed 1989’s one-year experiment with downtown flower boxes) were the brainchild of Phil Revoir of the Red Wing Noontime Kiwanis Club. They are still shepherded by the Noontime Kiwanis Club, but they require the teamwork of Kiwanis, Sargent’s, the city government and the Red Wing community.

Bob Lewis originally oversaw the planting process at Sargent’s, but the task now falls to Logan Leonard, the nursery’s annuals manager. And it’s an intensive process.

Approximately 300 baskets are assembled each year and each basket contains 11 plants, Leonard said. That means Sargent’s nurtures 3,300 plants for the process.

Across the three and a half decades of flower baskets, the species and colors have changed, but for the last dozen years the flowers have included two Calibrachoa, three ivy geraniums and six petunias.

The flowers are not grown from seeds, but rather cut from other plants. 

“In our case, the flowers for the baskets start from rooted cuttings, which are stem sections that have been encouraged to develop their own roots,” Leonard said.

This approach creates more consistent plants that grow more quickly.

It takes Sargent’s employees about four days to assemble and plant all the baskets, then for two months the baskets are nurtured in their greenhouse where they are watered every day.

All told, the baskets fill approximately 1,200 square feet of Sargent’s operation.

On top of this, Sargent’s prepares flower baskets for their store for decoration and to go on sale in the first half of May. Sargent’s also makes them for two Wisconsin towns, Onalaska and Prescott.

At the end of May the baskets make their way to the light poles. The city continues to water the plants every day until October. Typically, the summer watering is done by high school and college students, but when they return to school, a group of community volunteers takes over the watering until the baskets are removed.

It requires a lot of work, but it is worth it to make downtown beautiful.

It doesn’t come cheap, though. Sargent’s donates their labor to the process, and the city buys 46 of the baskets, but the rest of the baskets and the resources necessary to keep them healthy cost just over $40,000 last year. That bill is paid entirely by money collected from the community by the Red Wing Noontime Kiwanis Club.

They’ve been able to maintain the quality and the quantity of the baskets so far, but in future years that may not be the case.

Steve Setzer is the Noontime Kiwanis member who now oversees the flower basket program, and he said: “We have been falling short the last few years on funds we need to pay those expenses.”

The money comes from a variety of sources. Some come from small donations of $10 or $20, some are larger donations from local philanthropic foundations, and others come as larger donations by Red Wing residents and businesses. Regardless of how, Setzer and the Noontime Kiwanis Club are hoping more residents will chip in to keep this tradition alive.

Anyone who would like to donate can visit www.redwingnoontimekiwanis.org/what-we-do for more information.

This story originally appeared in the Red Wing Republican Eagle.