Center City flowers for residents, workers, and shoppers

By: Deborah Johnson Wood

Thirty-five planters along Grand Rapids’ Monroe Center welcome shoppers and workers downtown with vibrant colors bursting with spring cheer. The planters are part of the downtown area’s 80-plus planters and flowerbeds in the core business district—the most planters ever in the downtown.

“One of the roles of downtown is to create a gathering spot for people, and having an area that’s clean and bright and pretty is an important aspect of that,” says Sharon Evoy, executive director of the Downtown Alliance, the organization responsible for maintaining the planters, flowerbeds, and the cleanliness of downtown.

“Beautification is a very important thing for the downtown,” she adds. “What we love is that people come downtown to see the flowers.”

Recent studies across the United States revealed that shoppers will spend 14 percent more money in landscaped shopping areas because they perceive the area as having greater value.

By early June, each 7-foot-long planter that now holds 75 snapdragons, pansies, trailing alyssum and parsley will overflow with new summer plantings.

“We have 29 planters designed for shade and eight designed for sun,” says Julie TerMolen, owner of Creekside Landscaping in Standale. The company fills the planter liners, grows them in greenhouses so the plants are mature by early June and sets the liners in place downtown.

The liners are in the greenhouses now, growing a combination of plants ranging from the tropical dieffenbachia to the red coleus, a plant popular in Britain during the Victorian era. Other summer plants include coral and red impatiens, euphorbia diamond frost, yellow dahlias, purple fountain grass and red sun devil begonias.

Source: Sharon Evoy, Downtown Alliance; Julie TerMolen, Creekside Landscaping

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Deborah Johnson Wood is the development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].