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Flora is not personally offering design services at this time.

Our staff designers, Daniel Nolan and Patrick Lannan, create beautiful gardens for our clients. Patrick and Daniel collaborate every day with Flora here at the store on making beautiful displays, implementing their garden designs, and thrilling our customers.

In this April’s Sunset Flora is featured among a group of ten garden innovators and trendsetters! Their “Growing Forward” article showcases people who are redefining gardening in the West. Sunset chose Flora because she’s “made plants cool” and “created a new kind of nursery that beckons all visitors…to explore and dream.”

Be sure to pick up this month’s issue to see Flora’s spread and read about all the Growing Forward innovators, including succulent grower (and our friend), Robin Stockwell, author Amy Stewart, urban gardener Novella Carpenter, landscape architects Walter Hood, Mia Lehrer and Steve Martino, and soil scientist David Montgomery.

Flora is honored to be included among such an amazing group of growers, activists, designers, and writers.

The New York Times’ Emily Weinstein wrote an article in August 2012 about outdoor bathing in the city. The Times included one of our designs, a bath set into a miniscule garden at a Mission District cottage. It was a collaboration a couple of years back between Seth Boor (of Boor Bridges Architecture), Kevin Smith of SmithBuilt, and me. Our friends at Concreteworks cast the tub on site.

Photo by Caitlin Atkinson. Framed air plant garden by Zenaida Sengo.

One of the keys to the success of this closet-sized courtyard (better known for the gardens on its walls) is the bath. Resting quietly in steaming water is one of the very best ways to enjoy a garden – any garden – in San Francisco’s chilly climate.  All you need is a thick towel, slippers, and robe to keep you comfortable when you emerge. The size of this particular space makes bathing the way to spend time in the garden. Staring at the stars, protected by walls, surrounded by beautiful plants, you melt into bliss.

Working with Seth Boor of Boor Bridges Architecture, and Kevin Smith of SmithBuilt, Flora designed these vertical gardens for the lobby of the Bardessono Hotel in the Napa Valley town of Yountville .

ABOVE: The bright light in the lobby keeps the plants happy.

ABOVE: The vertical air plant gardens that Seth Boor of Boor Bridges Architecture and I designed for the Napa Valley’s Bardessono Hotel a few years ago were a huge hit. After the Bardessono garden appeared in the New York Times, we heard from people all over the world asking how they could make their own. So Seth and I created Thigmotrope Satellite!

Flora Grubb and Kevin Smith remodeled the little cottage behind their house with the help of architect Seth Boor.  Seth brought ingenious design to the very, very small space. Kevin did the building, and Flora helped with the outdoor spaces.

ABOVE: How to create the feeling of a garden cottage when the “garden” is no bigger than a walk in closet? A vertical garden made of sempervivum provides a garden view that seems to go on forever.  This tiny garden also has a Japanese soaking tub. Lie in the tub, gaze at the garden, and look up at the stars and you’ve got all the garden you need.

ABOVE: The cottage was featured in Sunset Magazine and Garden Design Magazine, as well as several other magazines internationally and dozens of blogs.  It was included in the AIA Architecture in the City Tour.

We were thrilled to be invited to work with Alexis Traina on the plant design for her conservatory. We loved working with Alexis, and were honored to be a part of a project that included so many talented people. You can see Alexis and Trevor’s amazing house in Vogue Magazine. Here are our plants, looking oh so pretty.

ABOVE: The plants with the large leaves are Ficus lyrata, which create a canopy over the conservatory, making it feel like a garden. The pretty little palm is Phoenix roebelenii.

Check out our friends’ Claire Bigbie and Jay Shapiro’s house in the New York Times. I think Claire’s house is one of the most personal and inspiring interiors I have seen – which is why when Claire asked me to design the garden…I kind of froze up. I have had this experience only very rarely. Usually, when I walk into an outdoor space, the garden occurs to me immediately. It is all completely clear, often right down to the details. But after getting a tour of Claire’s house and seeing what she was all about, I was pretty nervous. Her interior set the bar pretty high.

It all came to me eventually. It is a big garden packed in to a small space.

 It is surprising and comfortable. Check out the Times article and enjoy the pictures of the house.

My sweetie Kevin Smith and I worked with Architect  Seth Boor to remodel the little cottage behind our house. Flora worked with Seth to design the small but spectacular outdoor spaces.

ABOVE: This is the front of the cottage. The intention for this garden is that the Azara microphylla will grow up to about 20-feet and have a nice canopy that will be lovely from the street level as well as from the rooftop. The garden is designed to be ultra-low maintenance. The chartreuse shrubs are Choisya ternata ‘Sundance’, which are performing well. The Philodendron ‘Xanadu’ is a workhorse of a plant, looking lovely in all seasons. I just can’t seem to design a garden without Astelia nivicola ‘Red Gem’, the silver grass-like plant that you can see just peeking over the curb. The Ceanothus griseus ‘Diamond Heights’ will someday pop up  over the little curb and soften the line a bit.

ABOVE: The sign above the front door is left over from when the cottage was a dance studio, Betty May’s School of Tap, for many years, from the 1940s until the 1980s.