Address

4124 Roseway Road
Minneapolis, MN 55409

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Contact

Phone: 612-230-6400
Emailinfo@minneapolisparks.org

Garden Hours

7:30 am-10 pm

Park Hours

6 am-midnight

Plan Your Route

Bus, bike, drive, or walk

Lyndale Park Peace Garden

Part of: Lyndale Park Gardens

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Activities

Peace Garden Volunteering:
Wednesdays, May – September, 9:30am – 11:30am. Email sbrooks@minneapolisparks.org for details.

Rose Garden Volunteering:
First and Third Saturdays, 9-11am, June – September. Email sbrooks@minneapolisparks.org for details.

Men’s & Women’s Garden Club of Minneapolis (MWGCM):
Two teams from the MWGCM care for the mixed border & native gardens. For more information about the MWGCM visit their website at www.mwgcm.org

Good to Know

Nearby Gardens:

Peak Display Time: April 15th through June 1st. Bloom period often begins in late-March until frost.

Weddings at Peace Garden

Amenities

  • Public Art
  • Walking Path

Glorious Gardens

From grand expanses to hidden gems, gardens throughout the park system offer flowers, history, sculpture, community hubs and more.

Longfellow Gardens

Neighborhood: East Harriet

Service Area: Southwest

Commissioner District: 6

The Peace Garden, originally named the Rock Garden for its light-colored, irregularly-shaped ancient rocks, creates a perfect micro-climate for alpine plants and dwarf conifers.

The Spirit of Peace

This bronze sculpture by local artist Caprice Glaser was dedicated in 2006, and is an official International Peace Site. The sculpture illustrates the folding of a peace crane, an ancient craft of origami. Information plaques atop stones around the walking path show how to make a peace crane. The word “peace” is engraved at the base of the stones in 23 languages.

This sculpture represents the international tradition honoring Sadako Saski, a girl who developed cancer from radiation released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Told of a Japanese legend that people who fold a thousand paper cranes will be granted a wish, she folded over one thousand cranes before her death at age 12.

Peace Garden Bridge

The bridge was installed in October 2009 and is highlighted by decorative copper sasi blocks and inlaid Minnesota granite. The bridge zigzags as Japanese tradition says that evil spirits walk only in straight lines, and the zigzag path will prevent them from following people into their garden retreats.

The bridge also features granite peace stones from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. They were found near Ground Zero in the rubble of the 1945 atomic bomb blast. The new, zigzagged bridge replaces a cedar footbridge built in 1985, removed in 2007 due to decay. It was designed by McKnight Distinguished Artist of the Year Kinji Akagawa, and Jerry Allan, Professor and Architect of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Pathway to Peace

A series of seven stone sculptures connecting East Harriet neighborhood with the Peace Garden. Each one displays words representing the community’s feelings about the meaning of peace.

Hibakuska Tree

The term is used to refer to victims of the bombings.

Rock Geology

The rocks at the Peace Garden are part of a rock unit known as the Oneota Dolomite. Oneota is a river (now known as the Upper Iowa River) in Northeastern Iowa, near where this unit was first described. The Oneota Dolomite is found in various localities in Southeastern Minnesota and in nearby parts of Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois. It is especially prominent as the cap rock on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River near Red Wing. Dolomite (sometimes called dolostone) is a rock that is very similar to limestone and is composed primarily of the mineral dolomite. The chemical composition of the mineral dolomite is calcium magnesium carbonate (Ca Mag (CO3)2).

The rocks were formed from sediment that was deposited in a prehistoric ocean which existed in this area about 500 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period. This was before the time of the dinosaurs, the dinosaurs having been present during the Mesozoic era, between 65 and 230 million years ago. However, there were plants and animals living in the ocean during the Ordovician Period and their remains (fossils) may rarely be found in the Oneota Dolomite. The fossils in the Oneota include snails and stromatolites (structures built by blue-green algae.) Clams, brachiopods, cephalopods and trilobites are also present, but are even less common. Some of the rocks at the Peace Garden contain large pores, called vugs, which were formed after the original sediment was deposited.

Some of the vugs are lined with a crust of very small quartz crystals. This crystallized crust was probably deposited by quartzsaturated fluid that circulated through the rock. The deposition process is similar to how rock candy is deposited on a stick when it is placed in a glass of water that is saturated with table sugar.

Source: Bill Rice, Curator with the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Minnesota.

Outdoor Weddings: Make your outdoor ceremony unique and memorable. View wedding permit details. Wedding Ceremony Application [PDF]

In 1924, Louis Boeglin, the park board horticulturist, planted a large new garden of perennial and annual flowers on the northern edge of the park west from King’s Highway. The garden was 1,000-feet long and from four- to twenty-feet wide and contained 10,000 plants. Wirth noted that the new planting attracted an unusual amount of attention and thousands of visitors. That year Louis Boeglin also proposed a rock garden planted with Alpine plants to the west of the new garden stretching toward the lake. With the creation of the perennial garden Lyndale Park replaced the Armory Garden at The Parade as the premier garden in the city. In fact Wirth proposed that with the decline in the Armory Garden and the need to replenish the soil there it would make sense to concentrate floriculture and plant collections at Lyndale, instead of renovating the Armory Garden. He went so far as to suggest that the Armory Garden might be better devoted to tennis courts.

Boeglin’s idea for a rock garden at Lyndale Park took a few years to develop, but he finally implemented his plan in 1929. He brought in Oneonta dolomite rocks collected from the Mississippi River bluffs in Wisconsin for the garden and planted alpine plants around them. Unfortunately, the rock garden fell into disrepair in the 1940s after Boeglin retired from the park board and was eventually overgrown with trees. It was not rediscovered and resurrected as a Rock Garden until the 1980s and was later transformed into the Peace Garden.

Park history compiled and written by David C. Smith.