By Linda Scherer
Staff Writer

FloraDora is a home-based garden center near Watertown owned by Duane and Renee Otto. There are 29 different gardens on 11 acres surrounding their 110-year-old, yellow-brick home.

In addition to selling garden products such as perennials, dried flowers, and hanging basket gardens, the Ottos offer garden consultations, horticultural classes, floral and gardening demonstrations, and tours of their gardens.

They provide a playhouse to keep children entertained, while parents look around, and a gift shop, including antiques. In the spring they have a plant sale, the fall a harvest sale and at Christmas they do a historical house tour, complete with a display of 20,000 Christmas lights.

About 12 years ago, the Ottos purchased the property on Carver County Road 24 with plans to start a garden center. Their newly purchased property had a few large trees, three peony plants, and two lilac bushes. Today, Flora Dora does not look anything like it did originally.

The Ottos have cleaned out and restored buildings, and are returning their home to its original form.

“We restore our house instead of remodel it. I don’t really feel that it is our house (the Ottos do own the home), but we are the caretakers of this house. We want to restore to what it used to look like,” Renee said.

“It is still missing a porch and we have bought a porch in pieces from an antique store and we will use it to put back on the house,” she added.

In addition to the minimal plant-life that FloraDora started with, the Ottos have added gardens like the Tropicanna garden which is on the center island of the driveway as you enter, a white garden called the English Allee, the windmill garden, which actually required moving a windmill to the garden center, and the Canna gardens, designs that were taken from pictures seen of an English palace garden.

All of the gardens have been created and planted based on a lot of research and design. Some, like the Canna gardens, which were made up of one large circle, three small circles and three rounded rectangles, required some physics to fit the geometric designs into a certain size section of their lawn.

To explain exactly how precise the gardens are, Renee pointed out, “If you stand in the front entrance of our home, and look through the entire house and out the back door, you can look straight down to the center, end of the garden, a total of 600 feet.”

Of the 29 gardens, Renee’s favorite garden is the newest addition to FloraDora, the windmill garden. “It has blue and yellow flowers, which Duane planted because they are my favorite,” Renee said.

Another garden that Renee likes is the rock garden around the FloraDora sign at the entrance of the garden center. She did that garden with the help of her son, and the design is her own. “Duane doesn’t like rocks,” Renee said.

Renee admits that she would like to have more to do with the gardens, but her husband, Duane, is the creator of most all of the gardens. “He really doesn’t let me garden, he only lets me weed.”

Duane has an endless supply of ideas that are not only on display at Flora Dora, but at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum where he is the supervisor, organizer, and designer of its gardens. He has been there 19 years, and considers it his dream job. Between working at the Arboretum and the gardens at FloraDora, Duane finds his time “is all used up.”

At the Arboretum, Duane is responsible for picking the color scheme each year to present to the director for his approval. He designed the popular “secret garden,” but has also designed many other gardens at the Arboretum as well.

“He has a huge garden notebook for every year at the Arboretum. Every garden is listed with the name of each plant, and how many seeds. It is very detailed with information for the entire Arboretum,” Renee said.

Duane and Renee have been married for 17 years and have very similar backgrounds; both have a love of gardening that began at a very early age.

Renee grew up on a dairy farm in Watertown. Her parents and her older brother lived in an upstairs apartment of her grandparents red brick home in Watertown. Renee refers to this home as “my Tara.”

When she was very young, Renee would bring home anything that she thought she could plant and make grow. Anything a neighbor or relative would throw away while gardening, she would bring it home and plant it.

At the age of 12, Renee started working in a greenhouse. She attended school at Brainerd Vo-Tech for retail floral and store management right after high school, and she has worked for the last 45 years, in 15 different flower shops. For the last four years, she has worked at Anthony’s in Mound.

Renee feels very fortunate to be able to schedule her work outside of her home to coincide with FloraDora’s off-season and be at home when they open their garden business in May.

She works at Anthony’s five days a week, six months a year – November to May. She works all of the holidays like Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and Mother’s Day and does Anthony’s wedding flowers in the evening.

Beginning the week after Mother’s Day, she starts working with their business at FloraDora for six months which is May to November.

Duane also grew up on a family-owned dairy farm in Arlington. He learned gardening from his grandmother when he was very young. He especially liked growing pumpkins.

Duane’s father wanted his son to be a farmer, but Duane’s heart and mind were into gardening. When his younger brother decided that he liked to farm, that gave Duane a little more freedom to continue with his gardening projects.

Duane not only gardened, but found he loved to landscape. When he was a teenager, he made his dad’s farm a show place. He also started putting up Christmas lights on his parents’ farm and people would come from all over to see the display.

He had always hoped to work for the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. He started putting together a portfolio with the plan that some day he would get the opportunity to show some of his ideas and designs.

Duane, who has a two-year degree in horticulture from the University of Minnesota, Waseca, worked for a couple of years at different occupations involving gardening including the Country Store in Waconia, where he met Renee 18 years ago.

He had not been at the country store very long when a job opened up at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, and he was hired.

“Duane is a flower person. He is passionate about what he does. He gives more than 100 percent in everything he does. Gardening is all he thinks about,” Renee said.

FloraDora garden center is a visual display of the amount of time and effort both Renee and Duane have put into their home and garden center. Their passion can easily be seen all around the center. Not just the gardens, but baskets and planters of flowers that decorate the center, some are so heavy they need to be lifted by two men, according to Renee. There are also home grown vegetables, and perennials that are offered seasonally.

Renee is very excited about her future flower shop which, at one time, was an old chicken barn. They began to work on it shortly after they moved to Watertown and continue to make progress on the building, slowly but surely. Most recently, they put on an addition when they reroofed and added 17 new windows.

All of the rafters were raised at the same time because Renee plans to hang dried flowers and garden baskets from the ceiling. There are also plans to be able to sell fresh garden bouquets for holidays and weddings. They are thinking the building will be ready within a year or two.

Duane and Renee Otto have a daughter, HillieRe, who will be 16 years old in November.

Renee has three children from a previous marriage, Ross, Rhett, and Reesa, and she has six grandchildren.