Gloria Weisgram loves the adventure of hunting in rural Minnesota and North Dakota. If the day is fine and she has the time, she’ll pack a picnic lunch and head out on the little dashed routes that web the map – drifting along country roads, turning at interesting-looking corners, following the gravel back into the hills and woods, and tracking her quarry in ditches and hedgerows and swampy spots along the way.
The game she hunts isn’t the kind with feathers or antlers – but, instead, the kind of wild life that has roots, leaves, gnarly stems and blossoms. For when Gloria takes her trophies home to her shop in Moorhead, she preserves the makings for magnificent prairie wreaths … and the holiday season is just around the corner.
“I never get tired of it,” she says. “I pick beautiful plants in beautiful places at beautiful times of the day. The spirit of the land – it’s in there, and people seem to love it.”
Moorhead’s wreath lady has been decking the halls of local homes and businesses for more than 30 years. What started as a holiday gift for a dear friend suffering through a devastating Christmas has become … not exactly a business, and much more than a hobby for the former art teacher. Call it a passion.
Some of this year’s first creations will be displayed in the atrium between Riverzen and Rustica in downtown Moorhead, starting with the Art Crawl Oct. 3 and 4. Most, though, will be picked out, one by one, by friends and strangers who peek into her garage at 508 Fifth Street South. She can generally be found in the fragrant, unheated space – cozy with braided rugs and baskets of dried plant life — on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from then until her stock runs out.
“I’m usually around then,” she notes. “People are welcome to stop by, take a look and pick out something that they’ll enjoy.” The early days of every week, though, find her on the road again, checking on the progress of prime patches she’s spotted earlier in the season. When they’ve reached their peaks, she picks them. Some materials dry overnight; others require far longer. Her harvest this fall not only supplies her current projects, but lays the foundations for next year’s crop.
Over the years that that Gloria has been picking and wreathing her creations, she’s had a number of inquiries from shopkeepers who’d like to resell her work. She has consented to a couple requests, including the Hjemkomst Center and Hollands.
“I enjoy meeting and visiting with people,” she says. “One of my goals is to provide a good quality product at an affordable price, and I try to make each wreath unique.”
A native of Grand Forks, Gloria has lived in her pretty little 1906 house on Fifth Street since 1983. At the time, she was teaching art at Cass Valley North (Gardner, Argusville and Grandin, N.D.), which eventually became Northern Cass. She spent the next 10 years as one of four partners in the Old Market Antique Shop on Seventh Avenue South, where she developed a special interest in handmade primitives and folk art. A few years later, she and a fellow teacher opened the Log Cabin Folk Art Center on the west edge of Woodlawn Park until it was moved to accommodate flood control.
For Gloria, hunting season begins in May and June in her own back yard, when her peonies come into bloom. She picks the perfect ones, then dries them upside down from the rafters of her shop. Their dusty rose pink becomes part of a surprisingly broad palette of color, along with blue salvia, statice, snowball hydrangea and a few other cultivated species. Fine pine cones come from North Shore adventures and the Minnesota woods.
Ninety percent of her all-natural wreath-making materials, though, come from the wild. She keeps an eagle eye out for specific patches where she chooses the best quality of her favorite plants and sages. She gathers for color, shape and texture, combining them into a complementary arrangement that gives each wreath a lively handmade look.
Friends who hunt turkey and pheasant often contribute tail and wing feathers. She’s only interested in a few of any bird’s feathers, the ones showing the best color and clearest marking; she admits, “I’m very picky.”
She’s also been known to collect tumbleweeds. Some become lacy, airy wreaths. Others are destined for more unusual shapes. She has made a twinkling tumbleweed Christmas tree, and one recent year decorated her front yard with a 10-foot tumbleweed snowman.
“The season never goes the same way twice. Every year is different,” she observes. This hot, dry autumn has brought out a bumper crop of some species but makes others scare. Their colors depend not only on the whims of each growing season, but on the precise moment when she goes picking; depending on its growth cycle, the same plant might dry to a pink, a deeper red or a tawny brown.
Sometimes passers-by spot her in a favorite field or ditch, picking away, and ask what she’s up to. “I just tell them I’m making something … nothing specific,” she reports. Nor does she share the exact location of her favorite spots.
“Anyone can find beautiful things if they only open their eyes,” the wreath lady asserts. “Trust me – you can do it, too. Just go out and look.
“We’re all creatures of the earth, and it’s beautiful. There’s a lot of earth out there.”
