Written by Alex Blondeau, Upstream Care for Place Fellow

On the north side of Fergus Falls, not far from where I grew up, there was once a junkyard. When I was probably still in junior high, the city purchased the land and hauled away all the broken cars. I remember it being an interesting place to explore—wetlands, wooded areas, and steep hillsides with boulders breaking through the surface of the gravelly ground. All that, with a few intriguing bits of remaining car parts.

Years later, after I had moved to central Minnesota, this forgotten landscape became the context for my awakening to the richness of western Minnesota’s natural heritage. While back visiting may parents in mid-April, I went out for a trail run through the old junk yard. I stopped on a boulder-studded ridge to tie my shoe, and as I knelt down I was greeted by a stunning, fuzzy blossom. The land around me was still dormant, so this little lavender beauty left me with a lot of questions.

Those questions began to lead me into a story that would transform the way I experience my relationship with the land on which I was born. What I had discovered that day was a very small patch of remnant prairie—a piece of land too rocky and steep to be plowed. The flower I had found is called a pasque flower, Anemone patens, a windflower. It is the very first to blossom on the spring prairie.

Over the years, I have returned each spring to that hillside, looking for my flower, and each spring, she has been nowhere to be found. They can live to be over 50 years old. Did I catch the last blossom of a pasque flower that hillside would ever know in perhaps 10,000 years?

To say that I have been captivated by the shape of this story—a shape I am only here hinting at—would be an understatement. Since then, I ended up moving back to Fergus Falls. I have installed a prairie restoration on our property, taken a position with United Prairie Foundation (UPF), and in 2023, opened Windflower Natives, my own native plant nursery. I specialize in growing plants that don’t express well when simply sown in a restoration seed mix (like, for example, the pasque flower).

I now work with other conservation organizations, like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, installing viable communities of these unique plants into restoration projects that would otherwise lack their presence and the important ecological roles they play.

It’s been nearly 20 years since I first discovered that pasque flower on that lonely hillside. In that time, the area has become Ferber Park, a city park with mountain bike trails that many in the community now love and enjoy. Unfortunately, the hillside had become increasingly overrun with buckthorn and invasive honeysuckle. Some friends and I would occasionally spend an afternoon with chainsaws and stump-treating chemicals, but the work was too much for us. Year by year, the brush continued to spread. Other unique flowers, like prairie smoke, began to disappear as the pasque flower had.

In lamenting this story with John DeVries, the president of UPF, he saw an opportunity. Through his nonprofit work, he collaborated with Wildlife Forever of St. Paul to secure grant funding to rehabilitate the remnant and planted prairies of Ferber Park. With the funding in place, I was turned loose to do the work. Using a skid steer with a tree shear attachment for the larger trees and brush, and a chainsaw for the steep hillsides, I made quick work of the woody invasives. In their place, hundreds of native plants grown by Windflower Natives were installed, with help from volunteers from Pedal Fergus Falls and the Minnesota Waters and Prairie chapter of the North Country Trail Association. The transformation, completed just last fall, has already been stunning.

As a final touch, I installed a handful of 3-year-old pasque flowers in the very area where I first discovered them. That was last fall. Today, April 12th, they have just begun blooming! Wouldn’t it be incredible if, like the blossoming pasque flowers, the emerging love people now feel for this place—and the sense of community that our care for it has created—meant these hillsides, once thought fit only as a home for our garbage, might bloom with native flowers for another 10,000 years?

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Alex Blondeau lives in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, among the hills that once formed the shores of Glacial Lake Agassiz. He was first introduced to the region’s natural wonders on hunting trips with his father, an art teacher and avid outdoorsman. Alex holds undergraduate degrees in fine arts and a PhD in theology from Luther Seminary in St. Paul. He is the owner of Windflower Natives, a mail-order native plant nursery specializing in some of the more difficult to find native plants.