Bird's-eye View Offers Insight for Upcoming Meeting on Landscaping the Midtown Greenway

by Jo Ann Musumeci, Whittier Neighborhood

Imagine this: You are a bird, maybe an indigo bunting, flying over south Minneapolis. It's spring. Below you see the big river rushing south to carry winter's weight away, and on its banks, borders of just-barely-green vegetation. You are flying toward your summer home, and in the near distance you see an east-west slightly-curvy band of green - a creek seems to be flowing through it - and a few miles north of that, another east-west band of green, this one almost straight. Both of these green corridors run right into the green border along the big river.

These two east-west corridors, connecting lakes on the west to the big river on the east, frame a network of corridors and patches of vegetation, inviting you and your other feathered friends to stop for food, cover, and nesting. You zoom down along the less curvy green ribbon, which just about divides the framed area in half, and you take cover in the four red cedars standing like sentinels around a resting place, before you fly on to the Eloise Butler garden where you'll spend the summer.

Now imagine you are a human again, bicycling down the Midtown Greenway, the same corridor you just left when you were an indigo bunting. As you pass under the rhythmic bridge shadows, you sense your progression from the change in plantings - a strand of flowers curbs the edge of the bike trail, but the rest of the slope is a backdrop, almost like a stage where the scenery changes. You pass through the colors of the rainbow or through patterns of plantings as you pedal smoothly, almost silently along. Nectar-borne fragrances push their way into your consciousness, taunting you, and perhaps butterflies and hummingbirds, too, to pause to seek their source. Your progression is punctuated by periodic groupings of trees - oaks or other trees that, in this pattern of four, are the signature of the Midtown Greenway.

Imagine you are taking a walk along the Greenway. You stop at one of the signature groupings of trees. Like the other plantings, they were native to the Twin Cities region before Europeans settled the area. You want to make your yard and community garden sustainable and attractive to wildlife like the plantings in the Greenway, so you have brought your notebook and camera along to get ideas from the flowers and grasses planted below these signature trees because they are labeled for easy identification. Then you walk to the newly-designed ground mosaic, a landmark piece for the entrance to the Seward Neighborhood, where you will meet a Seward gardener to talk about how that community created its Ring-around-the-Neighborhood community-wide garden concept that includes individual yards and garden corridors connecting to the Greenway and other main travel arteries. You want to get your neighborhood going in that direction.

These imaginary journeys convey the concepts of the Greenway landscape vision. The Greenway Coalition's Greening Committee developed the vision and landscape design contractor URS Corporation developed the unifying landscape themes, such as the signature tree plantings, but it will be up to neighborhoods, businesses, and community organizations in the vicinity of the Greenway to flesh out the vision and make it a reality. A public meeting is set for January to refine the unifying landscaping themes for the Greenway and talk about starting to plant some of them on Arbor Day 2003. Come join us for the meeting, details below:

Help Define Exciting Landscaping Themes to Beautify the Midtown Greenway

Thursday, January 30
6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Bryant Square Park W 31st St & Bryant Ave S
meal provided