Sandy Potvin
Parks and Recreation
by Katie Dougherty
Sandy Potvin loves seeing people’s reactions to the floral displays all across town that her team designs, plants, and maintains. “It just makes people happy,” Potvin says.
Potvin was first hired as a gardener in 2007. Now, as Horticulture Supervisor for the Municipality’s Parks and Recreation Department, her job varies by season and day-to-day.
But Potvin’s work starts long before more than 70,000 plants appear across town in the summer and includes more than just flowers.
“We design each bed individually every year, and so we’ve already designed for next year, and this winter we’ll design for 2020. We start with our perennials and our begonias in December because those take the longest to germinate and grow.”
In order to limit the amount of disease and pests that are introduced into the greenhouses, Potvin’s team starts everything from seed. Once the ground warms, it only takes the crews about three weeks to plant beds from Oceanview to Town Square Park.
Potvin’s job, though, isn’t “floriculture,” and her crews’ work involves maintenance of trees, shrubs, turf, ML&P sites, a tropical solarium, and more.
“A lot of people think all we do is flowers — but we take care of a lot of different things.”
Sandy oversees two permanent gardeners, and takes on more than 20 seasonal hires. She works in tandem with departments ranging from Street Maintenance to Municipal Light and Power to finish work all across town.
For Potvin, the annual planting is a point of pride; not just for her, but for the whole community.
“I’ve had people who have traveled the whole world who have said that our floral displays are some of the best they’ve ever seen, and that gives the whole city of Anchorage kudos.”
Outside of work, Potvin loves to garden with her grandkids, mixing flowers and vegetables in an edible garden.
