Name: Chasing Wildflowers Tea with Phyllis Root and Kelly Povo
Start: 2025-05-17T13:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-05-17T15:00:00-05:00
Location: 318 North Central Ave, Duluth, MN, United States, Minnesota 55807

Chasing Wildflowers Tea with Phyllis Root and Kelly Povo

Zenith Bookstore is delighted to invite you to our Chasing Wildflowers Tea at the beautiful Tasting Room (313 N Central Ave, Duluth) on Saturday, May 17th, 1-3 pm. All flower lovers are welcome! We will be celebrating the newly released Chasing Wildflowers: An Adventurous Guide to Finding Minnesota's Native Flowers in Their Unique Habitats by author Phyllis Root and photographer Kelly Povo. This is a ticketed event. Space is limited and tickets must be purchased by Monday, May 12th at noon. Invite your friends and family!
About the Chasing Wildflowers Tea: Tickets are available online and at Zenith Bookstore. There are 2 ticket options: Tea plus Book or Tea only. Both options include presentation with Phillis Root and Kelly Povo, meet-and-greet, tea bar, and tea finger foods catered by MidCoast Catering. Tea plus Book is $55 and includes a copy of Chasing Wildflowers for pickup at the event. Tea only ticket price is $30. Please let us know when purchasing your ticket if you’d like to request gluten-free or vegan food or email us at [email protected]. If you purchase your ticket online, we will have a will-call area at the event. Tickets are non-refundable but you may transfer them.
About the Book: In the years since Searching for Minnesota’s Native Wildflowers (2018) was published, it won’t surprise readers that Phyllis Root and Kelly Povo have just kept exploring. The response to their first flower book collaboration was so great that it led to their own kind of “flower chasers” identity, including the growing season audio postcards they’ve done since 2019 with Minnesota Public Radio and their Flower Chasers blog. For some time, they have been considering a follow-up book, and now we have one with Chasing Wildflowers: An Adventurous Guide to Finding Minnesota's Native Flowers in Their Unique Habitats.
In this new book, Root and Povo focus on exploring those smaller habitats beyond the main biomes of prairie, north woods, big woods—exploring patterned fens, forested swamps, the rocky north shore, dry hill prairies, even the natural afterlife of an open pit mine, all in search of those less-common wildflowers. This tighter focus on habitat focus allows for some truly rich writing on the places they explore, and the flowers they find (including all forty-four seeable orchids and thirteen milkweeds). And it’s wonderful how their friendship and their flower chasing together remains the heart of it all. With stories of the authors’ adventures and misadventures as two amateur wildflower seekers with no previous knowledge of botany or biology - they want readers to know that if they can teach themselves about native flowers, other non-scientists should be encouraged to go on their own searches for Minnesota’s native treasure.
About the Author: Phyllis Root has published fifty books, including Big Momma Makes the World, which won a Boston Globe Horn Book Award, Aunt Nancy and Old Man Trouble which won a Minnesota Book Award, Plant a Pocket of Prairie which won a John Burroughs Riverby Award, as did One North Star two years later, along with a Northeast Minnesota Book Award and an Midwest Independent Booksellers Award. She supports her writing habit by doing work for hire, editing, teaching, reviewing, and manuscript critiques and has learned that all writing is practice and that practice makes us better writers. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She still loves to read, still loves being outdoors, still loves the sound of words.
About the Photographer: Kelly Povo is a professional photographer for the past thirty years and has exhibited in galleries and art shows across the country. At seven years old, she would never have guessed that collecting 500 bazooka comics to send off for her first camera would lead to her career in photography. That was a lot of gum chewing! Her first camera captured the events in her young life and began a journey in photography that has taken her all across the United States. She lives in the Twin Cities.