9 Best Garden Centers and Nurseries in Minnesota!
One way Minnesotans revel in our short-but-spectacular warm weather is to garden. Whether flowers, vegetables, or ornamental, citizens of the North Star State love to spruce up their yards. Here are some of our favorite places to get a jump on gardening season.
Abrahamson Nurseries, Stillwater, MN
With three locations in the St. Croix River Valley, Abrahamson Nursery boasts a big variety for all of your backyard gardening needs. Abrahamson’s has been in business for nearly a century, growing their own greenhouse stock and staffing each of their garden centers with materials and expert landscape designers to answer location and climate-specific questions.
Drummers Garden Center & Floral, Mankato, MN
Drummers Garden Center & floral boasts four acres of outdoor display area, along with garden products, seeds, vegetables, annuals, succulents, and more than 800 perennials. Landscaping experts with 3D imaging equipment can help you plan your planting. Drummers doesn’t stop at its garden center, though. It’s also a full-service floral shop.
Dundee Nursery and Landscaping, Osseo, MN
Dundee Nursery and Landscaping is a total garden center with flowers, decorative ground cover, shrubbery and more. But its selection of trees—particularly fruit trees—really sets it apart from other garden centers in the metro. If you can’t find the tree you’re looking for at Dundee, you’ll be hard-pressed to find it elsewhere.
Engwall Flowers, Duluth, MN
Engwall’s started as a vegetable farm in 1876, specializing in local truck crops. Today the greenhouse and garden center offers more than 200 varieties of annuals and 500 perennial varieties. Choose from more 450 varieties of trees, shrubs, and evergreens to add some verticality to your backyard landscape.
Tangletown Gardens, Minneapolis, MN
Although it’s located in the Tangletown neighborhood of South Minneapolis, all of Tangletown Gardens’ plants and produce (the also operate a CSA) are sustainably grown on its 140-acre farm and greenhouse in Plato, Minnesota. Specializing in perennial and garden varieties that thrive in the Minnesota climate, Tangletown Gardens is about as local as it gets.
Thomsens Garden Center, St. Joseph, MN
Founded in the 1970s, Thomsens has grown into one of the largest greenhouses and garden centers in the state. Because they grow everything the sell, they are experts on the plant material and how the varieties they sell perform in the climate of central Minnesota. Even better, they strive for sustainability, reusing and recycling much of the non-organic materials they use.
Mother Earth Gardens, Minneapolis, MN
Mother Earth Gardens has two locations in Minneapolis and each represents an urban oasis for plant-loving city dwellers. While the size of the lots limits the depth of the selection at Mother Earth, its eclectic breadth offers much to choose from. The varieties of plants and the decorative ornaments are selected and designed specifically for urban beautification.
Leitner’s Garden Center, St. Paul, MN
Named the Twin Cities’s “Best Garden Center” on more than one occasion, Leitner’s is definitely a favorite in the Metro Area. And for good reason. They have a great selection for an in-the-city garden center, but their knowledgeable and friendly staff is the clincher. The City Pages referred to Leitner’s as a “horticulture nerditorium.”
Highland Nursery, St. Paul, MN
Another “Best Garden Center” winner, Highland Nursery is almost more secret garden than garden center. Just off W. 7th in St. Paul, stepping through the doors into the retail area and then out among the lush greenery and garden materials beneath the oak trees and two acres of flowers, plants, bushes, and tress is like walking into another world. No wonder Highland Nursery has been a beloved St. Paul fixture for more than half a century.
