For The Love Of Flowers

    
    
Take a drive through the city of Glenwood and you’re likely to come across one of Luann Edwards’ beautification projects.

There’s the obvious – the colorful flower baskets in front of her hair salon on the south side of Town Square, but maybe you’ve also noticed the debris and volunteer trees she’s cleaned up at the city ballfield or along the railroad underpass at the entrance to the Glenwood Resource Center. Maybe you’ve seen the sprawling flower garden she’s planted and nurtured along the south side of The Opinion-Tribune newspaper office.  It adjoins a city parking lot.

“I walk around the town with the dogs and I see things other people don’t see,” Edwards said last week, as she spent time relaxing with her team of Pomeranians on a bench near the Glenwood Volunteer Fire Department’s Memorial Bell. “Somebody at the ballfield saw me with my clippers one day and thought I had gotten in trouble with the police and was doing community service hours.”

Edwards, who resides in a Town Square apartment in the building that houses her salon and her husband Joe’s design and screen printing business, brings her dogs out daily to the Firefighter Memorial Bell and city parking lot next to the newspaper office for exercise. Over the past few years, she’s brought color and life to the area she’s adopted as her own. There are zinnias, hosta plants, daylilies and zebra grass. Even an artistic display made from crushed ceramic tile her daughter Tessa had used for a college art project and a flag in honor of daughter Sierra who is serving in the U.S. Navy.

In Edwards’ garden, the weeds don’t stand a chance. She spends about an hour each evening watering and tending to her flowers and her efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. She’s received numerous compliments from GVFD firefighters and words of appreciation from staff at the newspaper.

Edwards said she hasn’t always had a green thumb or interest in landscaping.

“My parents sold their house in Sioux City so I went up and did all the landscaping at their house. Before that, I really hadn’t done a lot of this kind of stuff,” she said. “I’ve also replanted a friend’s yard on Sharp Street.”

Before renovating and moving into the apartment above their businesses, Luann and Joe Edwards lived on 10 acres near Mineola where she had all the space she needed to come up with some creative plantings. When they moved to Glenwood, the lack of a yard didn’t deter her. She’s turned a stretch of ground that was once covered with 1980s-era  lava rock into her own urban garden.

“It’s just something I enjoy doing and it really doesn’t cost  much because I get a lot of the seeds from a friend,” she said.