Our California Native Plant Garden, Born from Disaster
A beautiful end to a chaotic chapter in Native Poppy history: five new planter boxes are blooming at our South Park store!
If you’ve been following our story for a few years, you may remember the freak car accident that impacted our store back in the summer of 2022 – a driver collided with our shop, damaging the building (as well as our shelves, table displays, and hundreds of products) and forcing us to close for five months for renovations. A stressful experience, to say the least!
Luckily no one was injured in the crash, but it was certainly alarming. We advocated with city officials to request they assess public safety at our intersection. After completing a traffic study, the city increased the size of the stop signs, and improved visibility with flashing lights, but we hoped for even more improvements to keep our community safe. Native Poppy’s founder, Natalie Gill, envisioned beautiful, oversized planters filled with flowers, but heavy enough to reduce the risk of another auto collision with the storefront. Adding large cement planters felt like an extra layer of protection, both for our team, and for the neighbors who travel through this space daily. With the help of the South Park business group, we were able to secure five giant concrete planters to create a safety barrier, which has become a California native plant garden!
Seeding the Idea for New Planters
After weathering such a long closure of the South Park store, we were excited to push these improvements forward, but needed to ask our community for support to make it happen.
“I tend to have a very ‘I’ll do it myself,’ type of attitude, and I don’t like to ask for help,” says Natalie. “But in times like these where we do ask for help it reminds me how amazing our community is. I’m so grateful for people’s generosity and kindness – I just wanna pass that on to the next person.”
Our dream was to create planters that would not just keep our team safe, but would also add beauty to the neighborhood, and become an oasis for pollinators, too.
Talk about making lemons into lemonade: the new planters arrived and we were so excited to plant them up with gorgeous flowers. Bringing these beautiful planters to life was a true community effort! We received plant donations from Native West Nursery, which were carefully planted by resident garden expert, Margaret Roche, ensuring that each plant is set up for success. Each plant is a drought tolerant CA native, and we’re often able to water using water saved from our wholesale delivery buckets!
So what’s inside the planters? To start: more soil and compost than we expected! Just getting these planters filled was a challenge, and we received help from San Diegan Stephanie Pate, who helped coordinate donations of soil and native plants to get us started. To build a California native plant garden in these planters, we needed to find varieties that would thrive in full sun. We’ve planted multiple varieties, including Achillea millefolium, Achillea ‘Cerise Queen’, Achillea island pink, Salvia clevelandii 'Pozo Blue', Lepechinia fragrans, and Abutilon palmeri, all of which have been tolerant of the bright sun and limited water.
Decorating the Planters with Vibrant Patterns
The plain gray cement planters were chosen for their size and heft, but we couldn’t resist adding some Native Poppy flair. Each planter got a pretty pattern added to each side, each design created by Cassie Templeman, our Floral Design Project Coordinator for full service events – and a talented artist to boot! Each design featured whimsical hand-drawn blooms, inspired by cosmos, marigolds and other wildflowers that reflect our team’s garden aesthetic.
“There’s something magical about seeing your designs take root—literally—especially when our team brings them to life through color and collaboration,” says Cassie. Her designs add so much life to the planters – complementing the real blooms and adding color when the plants are dormant in the winter.
The whole Native Poppy team pitched in to paint all the tiny details over several days, in shades of pink and Poppy peach, of course! It wouldn’t be a Native Poppy mural if it weren’t floral and uplifting, and the transformation was so impactful. It meant so much to get positive feedback from passers-by, and hear our neighbors cheering us on while we put the finishing touches on this big project. This little plaza in front of our South Park flower shop now has three floral moments: the poppy mural on the wall, our silk floral arch in front of the window, and of course, the new floral planters filled with California native plants.
“It took a lot of community effort to get the planters, but I have been very heartened by how seriously the city council took the issue,” says Steven Topham, Native Poppy’s Operations Manager. “Being on site at the time of the accident made me starkly see their necessity. The size and quality of these planters makes me certain that our team and the community walking by are safe.”
We hope that the California native plant garden we created in these pretty planters adds beauty to the community, captures carbon and freshens the air, creates a lovely spot for pollinators to visit, and improves the safety of this intersection. After going through such a wild journey, it’s a beautiful feeling to see something positive come out of a difficult experience.
