by The Minneapolis Forestry Department turned a section of the Bohemian Flats regional park into its primary tree storage area in the spring of 2019. The city uses the area to store the plants that get placed in parks across the city.
Tyler Pederson, who works as a landscape design manager for the city, said that the location is convenient for the city’s projects.
“These are just the new trees, and we have to have a spot to put them,” he said. “This is a nice centrally located area in the city, where forestry crews from across the city will come in, grab a handful of these trees, go out, plant them, and kind of do that, throughout the day.”
Pederson also said that it’s more cost effective to keep trees in a spot where it’s easier to distribute them. Along with the convenience, it also gives onlookers something to be intrigued about.
“It’s just more efficient to do from here. And I think, you know, it’s kind of a utilitarian thing, but a lot of the people that walk by it are super interested in it, and nobody’s ever said, like, get that out of here. So I think people kind of like seeing all the brand new trees that we do, and it gives us an opportunity to show off how many trees we plant in a year.”
For neighbors of the flats, it’s a sight that regularly surprises them. Max Ryan, a student at the University of Minnesota who lives in Middlebrook hall, said that he enjoyed walking past the storage area and observing city workers.
“It’s a nice thing to wake up and just see them all moving around, moving the plants around and just doing stuff with them,” he said.
The park, which was formerly occupied by a shanty-town of Eastern European immigrants between the late 1800’s-early 1900’s, was turned into a boat launch after the settlement was evicted by 1931. The city transformed the area into the Bohemian Flats park in the late 1980’s.
