The owners of Mostly Natives Nursery in Tomales have sold the business to Darlene Johnson, an Oakland native with ties to West Marin who will re-open next weekend in Point Reyes Station.
Ms. Johnson, who worked at the nursery for the last few years, is rebuilding the business as a community nexus for horticulture lovers in a 4,000-square-foot outdoor-indoor space next to Point Reyes Compost.
“My real interest is in the intersection of plants and people,” said Ms. Johnson, who formerly ran a sign business in Berkeley. “People bring such good energy to nurseries and I really like the idea of this being a meeting place for people doing good work.”
Besides selling native plants, Ms. Johnson plans to host classes and music, and her soft opening next weekend will offer a taste of just that. Tables will feature a plant-dyed textiles artist, a beach-found fiber sculptor and a Japanese garden tools maker. She plans to have an ecology book section and a section dedicated to Japanese garden tools. Currently, she has three employees and expects to expand.
Last weekend, rows of native plants drank in the rains in the new space. Inside were scattered projects: a cash register and phone system waiting to be installed, a marked to-do list near the door.
Ms. Johnson, who comes from a long line of gardeners, has studied photography and graphic design and has an M.F.A. in poetry. She’s also had a lifelong relationship with plants: selling them in San Francisco’s Financial District, working on organic farms in Jamaica, studying horticulture at Merritt College and managing a store at the Ecology Center in Berkeley. She said all this experience informed her vision of the nursery as a gathering place for people and ideas.
“I felt like plants and small business were the common denominator in my life,” she said. Buying Mostly Natives, she went on, “It was a culmination of my life experience and passion.”
Mostly Natives was founded by Margaret Graham and Walter Earle in 1981. The couple met that year, while they both worked for the Fish and Game Department. “He knew about plants so we started doing landscaping jobs and tree work,” Ms. Graham recalled. “But we found it difficult to find native plants, so we started growing our own. Not a lot of people were growing natives at the time, especially on the coast.”
A year later, the couple had converted a plot of land off Highway 1 in Tomales that Ms. Graham purchased with a friend. There they grew flowering perennials, shrubs, native grasses and a vegetable garden. To help finance the business, the couple borrowed a few thousand dollars from family, but “neither of us liked to borrow money so we started small and then increased,” Ms. Graham said.
Eventually, the couple obtained retail and nursery permits. The name of their business was chosen for its brevity: “We tried all types of names and we didn’t even like that one but it seemed like it was descriptive and would short-circuit questions,” she said.
At first, the majority of their customers came from the East Bay, but soon West Marin followed. “The main group was Bolinas,” Ms. Graham said. “They really care about local business—I’d say more than any other community in West Marin. They made it a point to come up and we could always tell when a person from Bolinas walked into the nursery.”
Mostly Natives gradually grew because of a simple decision made by the two young business owners. “Generally, if you grew plants yourself, you just sold them to other retail outlets,” Ms. Graham said. “Most plants came from the Central Valley. In California, that’s how nurseries were known. To actually grow your own plants and then directly sell them in retail was pretty unusual.”
For over a decade, Ms. Johnson was a dedicated patron, returning for a biannual ritual of stocking up on natives. A mother of three, she fondly recalled her second son’s first birthday, when they stopped at Mostly Natives en route to Dillon Beach.
“It was a celebratory day, so of course it had to include Mostly Natives,” she said with a smile. “He wasn’t old enough to protest. My kids have been dragged to many nurseries.”
She began volunteering at the nursery in 2014, and was hired to work once a week the following year. In the fall of 2015, when Ms. Graham and Mr. Earle announced their plan to retire, Ms. Johnson moved quickly.
“I realized what a beloved piece of community it was and felt strongly that it should continue,” she said. “And when they sold it to me, they suggested the move to Point Reyes Station.”
To help finance the purchase, Ms. Johnson spent the past year acquiring loans from local funders and the SF-based small business loaner Working Solutions. “I had the vision, but was without the finances,” she said.
Mostly Natives hasn’t been the only place Ms. Johnson has worked in West Marin. In recent years, she also worked as a bookkeeper for Larner Seeds in Bolinas. She said many of her artistic mentors are in West Marin, including Stephen Ratcliffe of Bolinas, a professor with whom she studied poetry, and Kate Munger of Inverness, founder of Threshold Choir.
“Mostly Natives ended up being this public gathering place,” Ms. Johnson said. “We had live music on Fridays and there was a warm, inviting atmosphere which was very special to me. I want that for this place.”
Meanwhile Ms. Graham and Mr. Earle are retiring. “We were just perfectly fine with ending it,” Ms. Graham said. “We’ve reached a point where we’re worn out and want to try something new.”
Mostly Natives Nursery opens on Saturday, Feb. 18 at 54 B Street, Unit D, in Point Reyes Station. It will open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.