ABOVE: Cactus, kalanchoes, euphorbias, and tillandsia air plants look oh-so-pretty in Clarke’s collection of pottery, including one, at center behind the red pot, from Esther Studios’ Death Valley color line.

ABOVE: Tillandsia lovers freak out when they first see Clarke’s garden: It’s full of many different varieties, all thriving in the bright, protected urban setting, bracketed by three-story buildings. They combine beautifully with prickly-pear cactus (Opuntia sp.) at left, and Aeonium ‘Rubrum’ and a succulent cylindrical Senecio anteuphorbium at right.

ABOVE: A variegated tradescantia scrambles carefree behind Clarke’s Tillandsia seleriana and a collection of agaves.

ABOVE: Despite limited space, Clarke’s collection of trees, including a Cussonia transvaalensis, at left, and a spiny-trunk Ceiba speciosa, at right, play a key role in his garden’s design.

ABOVE: A spritely tillandsia cluster nestles into the lower leaves of an imperial alcantarea bromeliad from Brazil, at left. Tillandsias echo the rosette spirals of Aloe polyphylla and Aloe arborescens at right.

ABOVE: Driftwood is the home for an adorable cluster of thriving tillandsia air plants.

Workshops

We are excited about our 2013 events.

For July 6 & 7 our friends from Two Sparrows will be selling delicious sandwiches and salads for lunch.

Keep up with us here at the website, on our Facebook page, or on Twitter @floragrubb.

We host lots of daytime events here at the store and would love to have you come! Our specialty is free workshops where our expert staff teach ways to cultivate natural beauty in your garden and home, but we often play host to garden-club gatherings and occasionally book talks, teensy pop-up shops, live music, and food trucks.

If you’d like to bring a garden club or other group to visit us during business hours, contact our events manager.

We also offer custom workshops for groups: Contact our events manager for more information.

We do not book weddings or private parties.

Our Cutting Garden creates the amazing florals you see on our website for weddings and other events. View Susie’s recent work on The Cutting Garden blog, or contact Susie Nadler by email: susie@floragrubb.com.

For weddings and other private parties we recommend contacting our friends at The Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park, a unique living museum bursting with tropical life. Private rentals are available for a wide range of events. Contact Annie Abernethy, Special Events & Weddings Manager:  415-845-2394; rentals@sfcof.org; conservatoryofflowers.org/events/rentals

Dash & Albert have made a rug for all seasons made of superheroic polypropylene. These indoor/outdoor area rugs are terrific for high-traffic areas and stand up to garden dirt. They are scrubbable, bleachable, and UV-treated for outdoor use!

At left, the Negril rolls down a front stoop in style. You can’t help but feel elation looking at these colors.

ABOVE: From left to right, the Marina Stripe, the Happy Yellow, and the Kitchen Sink patterns. Which ones will you get to brighten your outdoors?

The Palm Broker, Jason Dewees, worked on this roof garden a couple of years back and we found it’s been growing in and looking amazing from below.

The palms the designer selected (based on Jason’s careful advice) were the Mexican blue palm, Brahea armata, and the pygmy date palm, Phoenix roebelenii. The blue palm is a fan palm from Baja California with a silvery-blue cast to the stiff leaves. The pygmy date palm comes from China and Laos. It’s a dainty, soft green miniature palm tree.

It is always exciting to watch trees lifted by a crane.

ABOVE: Pygmy date palm at left and Mexican blue palm at right were placed in planters custom-designed by the builder, Kevin Slagle.

ABOVE: The fronds make a fascinating silhouette against the sky, and pleasing color contrast against the building’s cladding.

ABOVE: Our staff designer, Daniel Nolan (top left), is one of Sunset’s five designers under 35 chosen to style the Sunset Home project at this year’s Sunset Celebration Weekend. What is the Sunset Home? It’s a reimagining of the former Sunset headquarters in Menlo Park inspired by the magazine’s 1940 – 1980 archives.

Daniel’s snapshots in the upper right and at bottom come from his forays to our growers’ grounds in San Diego County to pick out botanical treasures for the garden he’s creating. The design process has been under way for months now in preparation for the June 1 & 2 Celebration Weekend.

Daniel’s plan takes the best looks from Sunset’s archives while employing contemporary materials like Sunbrella fabrics and Trex decking. The result will be a current, water-conscious, design-conscious garden with graphic year-round appeal.

ABOVE: Choice agave specimens line up at our growing grounds in Rainbow Valley.

ABOVE: The wealth of materials at Daniel’s fingertips fed his inspiration. The Sunset Home’s outdoor spaces will be succulent- and palm-heavy, but will rely on classic boxwood forms and floral surprises to generate a modern exemplar of outdoor Western living.

ABOVE: At left, Daniel’s design sketches and plant lists mingle with design books. At right, Oscar de la Renta’s Dominican Republic garden informs Daniel’s process. Check out this interview with Daniel!

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.

Patrick Lannan has over 35 years experience in the garden industry. Educated at UCLA in horticulture and botany as well as fine arts, Patrick’s career spans from working in the rose garden at the Huntington Botanical Garden in Pasadena to establishing his own landscape company in Los Angeles with designs featured in Los Angeles Magazine.

He has also owned his own retail flower shop where his creations were seen daily on the Johnny Carson Show and The Late Show with Arsenio Hall. He was the horticulturist for the Manchester Country Club in New Hampshire for many years, and responsible for preserving the native flora of the golf course landscape.

Now as a garden designer at Flora Grubb Gardens, he feels he has truly found his home and thoroughly enjoys living in the Bay Area.

If you’d like to learn more about our design services, contact us at design@floragrubb.com / 415-694-6454.

We had a great turnout out for our pop-up shop the day before Mother’s Day. Thanks to everyone for paying us a visit!

Saturday’s pop-up shop featured tear-jerkingly beautiful hand-tied bouquets from Susie of The Cutting Garden and floral designer Max Gill (more info below), exquisite Recchiuti Confections, gorgeous bags and pocketbooks from Petel textiles, Luca Jackson‘s hand-printed and hand-stitched tea towels, napkins, and pillows, and delicious salads and sandwiches by Two Sparrows catering!

ABOVE: The folks from Recchiuti sold five gifts for the holiday pop up, including the Tea for Two Box with tea-infused confections (upper right, $22); the Butterfly Box with burnt-caramel chocolate truffles (lower right, $20); and the Mother’s Day Gift Box including teas, candied orange peel, and porcelain teacups by Bay Area ceramicist Rae Dunn (left, $120). They also had their insanely good Pâtes de Fruits ($23, gelatin-free!) and chocolate-enrobed Candied Orange Peel ($25), and samples!

ABOVE: Petel creates beautiful objects from handmade textiles (some antique) crafted on rugged African looms. They sold new clutches, zip pouches, pillows, and totes, some made for the Flora Grubb Gardens pop up especially for Mother’s Day. Their designs combine traditional West African colors and patterns with a contemporary western aesthetic. Petel’s materials are created by Fulani weavers in Mauritania and support these artisans.

ABOVE: Beautiful napkins and linens and pillows from Luca Jackson are hand-screened in San Francisco!

ABOVE: Two Sparrows flew in yummy provisions for lunch: salade Niçoise Cali with poached salmon,  chicken salad sandwich with Dijon vinaigrette base, and a farro tabbouleh  salad with feta, plus a selection of Eatwell Farm’s all natural Drinkwell Softers sodas.

Pop-Up Flower Shop, Saturday

Susie of The Cutting Garden and the celebrated Max Gill made exquisite bouquets, using California-grown flowers and foliage, including succulents and tillandsias and goodies gleaned from their own gardens!

ABOVE: Susie and Max chatted with customers at their flower stand about how they create their gorgeous designs with local, seasonal materials. They are featured in the very giftable The 50 Mile Bouquet, by Debra Prinzing and David Perry.

Mother’s Day, Sunday

Two Sparrows catering were back making delicious salads and sandwiches.

Thanks to all who helped make Mother’s Day weekend a total pleasure!

ABOVE: Lush Borinda fungosa bamboos on the lee wall contribute opulent green leaves and chocolatey-red culms to the vivid palette of silver, cream, black cherry, and olive. On the far wall, a pair of black-cherry-color Agonis flexuosa ‘Jervis Bay Afterdark’ rustle in the afternoon breezes over silvery Moroccan blue Mediterranean fan palms (Chamaerops humilis var. argentea) and the pearly blooms and ferny leaves of Grevillea ‘Moonlight’. At the base of the sunny left wall are clumps of large Cape rush, Chondropetalum elephantinum, with wiry stems of olive-green and chestnut brown. These will ultimately grow to match the height of the fence.

ABOVE: The dark patio retains warmth late into the day, encouraging people to linger till the skyline view begins to twinkle. A long rectangular planter containing grassy Juncus ‘Quartz Creek’ and flanked by show-stopping Aeonium ‘Sunburst’ divides the dymondia-edged gravel square from the “Midnight”-pigmented concrete patio.

ABOVE: Intriguing staghorn ferns (Platycerium bifurcatum) keep diners company from the east-facing lee wall. Below grows a bed of the grassy West Coast-native rush Juncus effusus ssp. pacificus ‘Quartz Creek’. A neighboring giant bird of paradise, Strelitzia nicolai, harmonizes with the subtropical-modern atmosphere.

ABOVE: Seen from the top of the house, the garden borrows beautiful greenery from neighbors.

ABOVE: A dusk view from the pea-gravel terrace encompasses the home aglow. We hope to get a repeat peek in a year or so, as plantings mature.

ABOVE: Kindergartener (and future nursery owner) Flora Grubb gathers flowers in Texas.

ABOVE: At our original location on Guerrero Street, a container garden designed by Flora…and at right, Flora, visiting a beautiful garden!

ABOVE: Starting from upper left, scenes from Guerrero Street include: a group shot of Saskia, Rodolfo, Flora, Clarke, Jim, and Laura; at middle left, Hank (The Plant Provocateur) and landscape architect Andrea Cochran; at lower left, Flora with Betsy Flack of The Garden Conservancy; and a lovely boxed kentia palm, Howea forsteriana.

Do you remember when our nursery was called Guerrero Street Gardens? How about when it was The Palm Broker, before Saul and Flora took over the business back in 2003?

ABOVE: At Guerrero Street, Laura Stratton, the manager of the nursery, holds Deuce. Deuce always rode along with Armando, our genius palm installer and driver of the Palm Broker truck (lower left) for deliveries. Neighborhood volunteers, below, install median plantings on Guerrero and Chavez streets that Flora designed and that the nursery supplied.

ABOVE, AT TOP: Architect Seth Boor of Boor Bridges Architecture, Flora, and Jim review the model of our new Jerrold Avenue nursery building in 2006. Construction shots follow. At bottom left a crew preps the root-ball of our big Canary Island date palm on Guerrero Street for its trip over to Jerrold for planting. At right, Flora and Juliana pose in blue helmets.

ABOVE: We planted big specimen palms in February, 2007, with a crane. Once the decomposed-granite mulch was laid down and the barn-wood paneling was mounted, the beauty of the new store began to emerge. At center right, business partners Saul Nadler and Flora pose as “American Gothic.” At bottom, Flora’s brother Moses Grubb led bike-powered carnival rides with Cyclecide as part of opening-day festivities, May, 2007.

ABOVE: On opening day for the new store in May, 2007, architect Seth Boor, who with his partner Bonnie Bridges designed the new store, poses with Saul and Flora at top. Below, Flora’s business partner Saul and his wife Susie Nadler of The Cutting Garden smile for the camera flanking Jason Dewees, staff horticulturist and palm specialist.

ABOVE: Try as he might, even handsome Clarke can’t upstage a blooming aloe hybrid (lower left). Is it the aloe’s brilliance that’s causing Jim to squint over his shoulder, or the bright sun of San Diego County’s Rainbow Valley, home of our growing grounds? At lower right, Armando, Rodolfo, Shaun, and Sydney pose with a flower-bedecked cake. Just above, Sydney, Roger, Flora, and Jim take a rare breather on the Concreteworks chaises.

ABOVE: More scenes from our opening-day party, including, second from bottom-right, Eileen Hassi, owner of Ritual Coffee Roasters, grabbing fresh beans.

It’s been an amazing 10 years, and we’re grateful to you, our customers and friends! None of this garden goodness and beauty would be here if it weren’t for you.