Behind the scenes with Huntsville’s beautiful flowers

Published on April 28, 2024

You’ve seen their work in the hanging baskets in and around downtown Huntsville or in flower beds and brick planters throughout the city. They bring a smile to your face, make your day a little better and quietly beautify a hustle-and-bustle world.

Best of all, these decorations are homemade by Green Team – delivering joy on days moving a little too fast, a little too frantic.

“This is my happy place,” said Stacy Scannell as she stands at one end of Green Team’s greenhouse in the Lowe Mill District and looks toward the other end with thousands of flowers in between.

It’s a splendid mid-April morning and the fragrance of those flowers fills the air in the greenhouse. And maybe at this moment, there is no better place to be in Huntsville. There are 250 baskets of colorful petunias hanging in the greenhouse that within days be dispatched around the city. Still more petunias are blooming and ready for the flower beds and brick planters.

It’s like a peek behind the curtain before it’s raised and revealed for everyone to see. And it’s a spectacular sight.

“I love it,” Scannell said. “I love my job.”

Her title, formally, is landscape maintenance project supervisor. But Scannell is actually “a flower genius,” according to her supervisor, Kevin Winkles.

While there is always something growing in the greenhouse, the spring flowers that are now going out around town are planted in February when the warm days of April and May can seem far away.

“It’s the end of February that we start the baskets,” Scannell said. “We do that for a couple of weeks. And then the following week, we start getting these plugs in (referring to the flowers that aren’t in the hanging baskets.).”

And as beautiful as the greenhouse looks at this moment and as beautiful as these flowers will soon look hanging from streetlight poles or in a sidewalk brick planter, the work to make it all happen becomes more apparent.

These pretty flowers and this effort to accentuate the beauty of Huntsville doesn’t just happen without a plan to make it all come together.

“Of course, there’s just making sure we have all the supplies we need – soil, the pots, the fertilizer,” Scannell said.

Green Team members also take care of the less obvious needs. To maximize space in the green house, they built tables with wiring to provide a secure place to sit the small pots while the growing happens. It could be petunias or maybe tomato or cucumber plants that Green Team gave away in April at the Spring Plant & Cleanup Supply Giveaway and the Earth Day celebration at Hays Nature Preserve.

“It’s ongoing until they all get out of here,” Scannell said. “Then we clean it up and get it ready for the next round.

“We’ve got a fabulous crew and they work really hard at getting the flowers out and making them look pretty. They’re really proud of it.”