Coming up roses: City gardeners put ‘petal’ to the metal every spring to help Winnipeg blossom By: Morgan Modjeski Posted: 12:23 PM CDT Monday, May. 18, 2026

They get little recognition, but the work they do every summer is admired by thousands across Winnipeg.

As the overnight frost clears for the season, flower beds and pots across the city will be filled and refreshed. Behind the effort is a team of 40 gardeners, injecting splashes of purple, gold, yellow and red into the cityscape.

David Domke, the city’s manager of parks and open space, said like the gardens they tend to, the team of green thumbs is diverse.

“It’s really a mixture of experienced and inexperienced people. A lot of the time, we’ve got some pretty serious gardeners,” he said. “We get them all over the place really, but they all have one thing in common; and that’s a real love of plants.”

The gardeners tend and beautify more than 29,000 square metres of floral arrangements — more than three CFL football fields in flowers — and maintain over 1,600 flower pots.

“We look for things that are unique,” said Domke of the city’s flower selection, which is custom ordered from greenhouses.

He said the season actually begins as it ends. When the flowers are pulled for the year during the Thanksgiving weekend, gardeners start mapping out designs for the spring — with the floral plans laid out before they’re set in soil.

There’s also a science to the setup, Domke said, following a “thriller, chiller, spiller” approach to design eye-catching gardens. The thriller is usually a tall plant that protrudes upwards from the pot. The chiller is a medium-sized plant that fills the remaining space at the soil level. The spiller are plants that overflow from the pot.

The city spends more than $220,000 on annuals, Domke said. While floral beds and flower pots are carefully planned today, that hasn’t always been the case. About 20 years ago, it was general labourers who handled floral efforts, leaving a lot to be desired.

“The floral displays we had were kind of basic,” said Domke. “As soon as we got this position — and it’s been a lot of years since then — of the gardeners, there’s just been a complete acceleration.”

The Free Press requested to speak with one of the city’s gardeners, but Domke said they would rather be deep in the soil than in the spotlight.

Located streetside, Domke said there are 12 to 18 instances annually where the flower pots get smashed by motorists, but said the effort is widely well respected, as vandalism is rare.

The work has not gone unnoticed by other Manitoba gardeners.

“When you stop and think about the vastness and the landscape of the city of Winnipeg and imagine it’s only 40 people who are doing all of that. Wow,” said Mike Mailman, owner of seed library Mailman Pharms. “They must have an impeccable plan.”

Mailman said the relationship that forms between gardeners and the plants they care for goes right to the roots, but it’s not always the green thumb behind it who gets the recognition.

“It’s a thankless job, quite frankly, for a lot of these people,” he said. “They themselves don’t get any of the credit for the hard work they do, and make no mistake, it is not an easy job to take care of a garden.”

The planting is expected to begin later this month.

To keep the thousands of square metres of floral displays green, three 1,000-gallon tanker trucks water over the summer, Monday to Friday, and on weekends if it is especially hot.

If any residents see a flower pot or bed in rough shape, they’re asked to contact 311.

morgan.modjeski@freepress.mb.ca