Before they immigrated to Minnesota five years ago, Addisalem Tadesse and her husband, Tsegaye Berga, owned a house in central Ethiopia. Like most of their neighbors in Asella, they had flowerbeds in the front yard along with a bit of green grass and they grew vegetables in a big backyard surrounded by a tall stone fence. In many ways, they say, their landscape didn’t look all that much different from the yards they see in their north Minneapolis neighborhood. Except for the grass. That’s not at all the same.

“Back home the grass grows wild and has a lot of weeds,” Berga explains. “It’s green like it is here, but we don’t mow it. We cut it down with a sickle.”

“And it doesn’t come in blankets like it does here,” Tadesse adds, scrunching up her brow while searching for the still unfamiliar word sod. “No,” she continues, “they don’t grow sod like they do here and then come and roll it out onto people’s yards.”

In addition to their introduction to America’s fascination with turf grass, Tadesse and Berga have learned a lot about local horticulture in recent months. Back in April, the couple and their 5-year-old daughter, Hana, gathered around their living room coffee table with three University of Minnesota Extension Service Hennepin County master gardeners to talk about a landscape plan for their home, purchased through Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity in February. Tadesse and Berga flipped through photographs of flowers, shrubs, and trees, with Hana nodding enthusiastically at anything pink.

Meanwhile, the master gardeners offered advice on what would thrive in the sunny front yard and what to try on the sometimes water-logged north side of the house. They advised against plants with toxic berries or thorns because of Hana and the couple’s two older boys—Robel, 16, and Nahom, 13—who like to kick a soccer ball around the backyard with neighborhood friends. And they explained landscape practices that new homeowners need to know, such as when to water plants, how often to mow the lawn, and how to prepare garden beds for a Minnesota winter.

It’s a unique partnership through which Habitat homeowners work side-by-side with master gardeners to create beautiful yards that turn houses into homes.

The broader landscape

Working with Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity is just one of many projects master gardeners in Minnesota devote time to every season. Simply put, master gardeners are volunteers who use their ongoing horticultural training to help with a wide range of community projects, including staffing information booths at fairs and garden centers, answering phone calls to the master gardener hotline, teaching classes and workshops, helping people establish and maintain community gardens, assisting kids and adults with tree-planting projects, and providing training and assistance with the establishment of eco-friendly landscapes like native prairies and rain gardens.

This year, the Hennepin County Master Gardener Program celebrates its 30th year of service. What began as a handful of committed gardeners has grown to more than 235 volunteers who, last year, contributed nearly 11,000 hours of outreach service to more than 36,374 people in Hennepin County. “I think master gardening is such a good example of how the Extension program brings high-quality horticultural research to the community by really getting out there and educating people,” says Terry Straub, coordinator of the Hennepin County Master Gardener Program.

Barbara Grossman, urban operations director of the University of Minnesota Extension Service, says the key to the Habitat/master gardener partnership lies in the practical way gardeners engage the public. “Master gardeners are great ambassadors for the University,” she explains. “They work directly with people and they explain more than the beauty of landscaping. They’re talking with people about things like why landscaping is important and how to create landscapes that won’t cause a security problem, like having tall shrubs near the door.”

Taking root

“Landscapes got done pretty much through donations of hostas or anything volunteers could come up with,” recalls Lou Ann Keleher, former master gardener and past coordinator of the Habitat/master gardener program. “So Jack started going around to garden centers and asking them to donate plants. Based on what they got, they planned each site and planted it.”

Duchow’s hard work paid off and, by 2001, a system of matching new homeowners with master gardener volunteers was in place. Now, locally based national wholesaler Bailey Nurseries and Gertens, a local garden center, donate a wide variety of plants each year for Habitat yards.

Including the homeowners in the process made a huge difference in the program’s success, says Norma Wubbena, a longtime master gardener who acts as the liaison between Habitat and gardeners working on homes in Hennepin County. “When I did my first Habitat homes in 1999 and 2000, people weren’t living there yet so they had no investment in the landscape and didn’t take care of it. Now that we have families choose plants they like and help plant them, there’s much more of a sense of ownership and pride.”

Over the years, the Habitat/master gardener partnership has grown to include the seven-county metro area. About 50 homeowners like Tadesse and Berga work closely with master gardeners each year to create landscapes that will thrive and complement their homes without overgrowing their lives.

To help new homeowners with ongoing questions about their landscapes, master gardeners have put together a handbook describing gardening basics for every season. They give each family a copy on planting day and put their phone numbers on the back. Follow-up visits by master gardeners in the spring and fall also help homeowners keep their landscapes in good shape. 

But the broader purpose is about much more than improving individual properties. Habitat’s mission has always been the elimination of what’s often referred to as “poverty housing.” Peeling paint, front doors off their hinges, and weedy, overgrown lawns tend to breed more of the same. By improving the neighborhoods they work in, by building quality homes that include good landscaping, Habitat aims to create a ripple effect, inspiring other homeowners to keep up their properties and focus more eyes and ears on the street.

“We’ve really seen a change in the neighborhoods where we’ve built,” says Terry Barnes, a construction support associate with Habitat who often works directly with master gardeners. “Vandalism and crime go down because people see others who care, and they start caring more too.”

Planting day

Three Habitat homes built in a row on the same street are all being landscaped an early June Saturday. Tadesse, Berga, and their three children, who live in the yellow house in the middle, are already up and ready to dig in when master gardeners arrive at 8 a.m. to organize plants and tools dropped off by Habitat the day before. Volunteers will start to arrive in an hour.

Robel and Nahom work fast, loading plants into wheelbarrows and hauling them to where they’ll soon be planted in new garden beds. Next door, Said Hasan and his seven children are just as busy, moving plants and talking with master gardeners about the best place for a lilac hedge in between the two houses. “I’m so happy,” Hasan says. “I have a beautiful house, and now I will have a beautiful house with flowers.”

By 9:30 the street is lined with cars as volunteers stream into the three yards. Because Habitat requires new homebuyers to contribute sweat equity to their own homes as well as to other Habitat homes, many of the volunteers are families who who will soon be moving into houses of their own. Ukrainians, Hmong, Ethiopians, Somalis, and Americans form work crews that plant privacy hedges and check that trees don’t go into the ground crooked.

In Tadesse’s case, it isn’t trees that most concern her. It’s roses—five along each side of the front walk—and she already envisions them blooming in shades of red and pink. Kneeling beside master gardener Cathy Seviola, Tadesse and her son Nahom learn to dig a hole and then place the plant, pot and all, in the ground to be sure it’s not too deep before putting it in the ground. They plant each rose before moving on to the other perennial flowers in the wide, curving beds.

By 1 p.m., the planting is finished and kids race back and forth across all three yards, kicking a ball and spraying each other with the garden hose. As Robel lay in the grass nearby, Tadesse and Berga plant a few tomatoes, peppers, and chives in a small vegetable plot.

“There aren’t words to explain how happy we are,” she says. “When you own a house you want it to be beautiful and you want to take care of it. This was done in so short a time and it makes us feel so much better about where we live.”

Next door, Hasan sweeps the last bit of dirt off his driveway and smiles. “Flowers and trees have made it really nice here,” he says. “You know, without landscaping, you’ve got life without life.”