A Beautification Award… and a whole lot of Brome Grass
In November, the Marquette Beautification & Restoration Committee awarded the Marquette Food Co-op with the Sally Closser Green Spirit Award.
The award recognizes the Co-op’s numerous environmental initiatives, including our rooftop rain collection system that diverts water into a large underground tank near the deli that is then used to water the facility’s gardens and our newly cultivated rain garden that provides for infiltration of stormwater.
Designed and installed by our local community partner, Plant Theory Landscaping Company, our rain garden features many native wildflowers which provide soil stabilization, pollinator habitat, and of course — beauty!
We want to offer our sincerest thanks to Kim Melko and her Plant Theory team for their hard work! Kim provided a thoughtful write up on her vision for the space and how her team carried it through, read below.
By Kim Melko, Plant Theory
The 2025 Beautification Award stands as a reminder that gardening carries a meaningful responsibility — thank you, Marquette Beautification! Today, that responsibility leans toward gardening lighter: more sustainably, more thoughtfully, and in collaboration with nature (because, frankly, she always has opinions). The spaces we shape and care for speak to our internal values. Landscapes — whether in front
of a home, a business, or a beloved community grocery store — tend to reveal our internal values. At the Co-op, stewardship, sustainability, and giving a little love back to the natural world that feeds us, is represented.
Each landscape has its own history, goals, hurdles to overcome, and issues to solve. The Co-op site is uniquely positioned, creating a fun challenge where the runoff from 7th, Washington, and 6th streets all converge, creating one common point for the water after a rain. It is basically the neighborhood’s unofficial water slide during a rainstorm.Compounding the drainage issue was a dense mat of smooth brome grass in the parking-lot strip, one of the toughest perennials we
have had to remediate to date! If you’ve never had the pleasure of meeting brome grass, a true cool weather perennial, imagine a plant that wakes up earlier than all the others, drinks their coffee black, and then assertively outcompetes everything before they even break bud. It forms a dense mat of sharp blades of grass that laughs in the face of drainage and refuses to let anything else grow. Truly, one of our greatest opponents to date, and that’s saying something.
Before we could plant even a single rudbeckia, we had to address the drainage. Our team trenched key areas then laid aggregate to capture and direct runoff into the stormwater system. Once the water was flowing in the right direction, we could move on to implementing the rendered design and installing plants and shrubs!
The new garden beds are designed to highlight native plants in a colorful way that feels both welcoming and practical for a high-traffic, commercial space. It is a naturalistic meadow style planting utilizing tall clumping grasses to support the four-feet tall flowering helianthus and eupatorium of equal height. We selected resilient, drought-tolerant native perennials — beardtongue, agastache, asters, and strategically placed chelone to help manage wetter pockets (chelone loves wet feet). Well branched Viburnum and Aronia and the less utilized Fothergilla shrubs are year-round interest that provide structure and support.
Today, the Co-op’s landscape doesn’t just survive — it thrives — right in the middle of an urban environment. Pollinators hover happily, colors shift throughout the seasons, a chickadee drops in for a chokeberry, and for a moment, we hope a quick stop for groceries might turn into something unexpectedly beautiful. The Marquette Food Co-op has always been about community, sustainability, and good stewardship. We hope that the landscape tells that same story — one native bloom at a time.