VITAL STATS: 

First job: At a toy store near my house when I was about 9 or 10
Best job: Owning and running Flora Grubb
Greatest challenge: Work/life balance
Starting salary: $5/hr gardening for neighbors
Site: floragrubb.com

So Flora, how’d you get that f#$%*^% awesome job?
I’ve always been a gardener, and I’d always wanted to live in San Francisco because you can garden here year round. But when I finally moved to SF in the early 2000s, I realized quickly that I needed quite a bit of education because the climate is so different from Texas, where I’m from. So I got a job at a dot.com and set out to learn everything I could about gardening here in my spare time. When I was eventually laid off [because of the crash], I started my own landscaping company. That’s how I met my current business partner, Saul Nadler. I had done a garden for him and his wife and always talked about starting a nursery someday. Saul approached me and asked if I wanted a partner. I ignored him for a while because I thought he was BS-ing, but eventually I agreed, and we found a small, run-down nursery on the edge of Noe Valley. Half of it was covered in blackberry bramble, and it had this funky old trailer on it.

Did you ever envision the nursery becoming what it is today?
Looking back, I can’t believe we had the nerve to do what we did. Neither Saul nor I had had any experience running a business or working in retail, and neither of us had ever worked at a nursery before. (Saul has a degree in Russian History and was trained classically as a chef). It hadn’t even occurred to us that we might need a cash register! So after we opened we were like, “this seems to be working, we might need a cash register!” I started calling up nurseries and ordering the plants I liked. We managed to establish a neighborhood nursery that quickly became a regional destination. People really liked what I was buying, and, by the time we’d outgrown our first location and had started looking for a second, we had a pretty well-established look.

When did Flora Grubb Gardens really take off?
In 2007, the now defunct House & Garden magazine listed me in their annual “Tastemakers” issue, but it wasn’t for my garden design. I was singled out for my nursery and the fact that I was carving out a place within the garden design community. When that story came out, the press began looking at us differently, and it brought a lot of people into the store.

How has your job changed over the years?
When we first started, there were just four of us, and now there are 25 or more employees! So a lot of what I do is work with and manage my amazing staff. I used to think that if I didn’t want to have a store anymore, I would just go back to garden design. But now I think if I didn’t have a garden store, I would go into some other form of retail. I really love creating a transformative space and doing something beyond what’s expected. It’s not that I love plants and hate having a store, which is the case for a lot of people in my industry.

What is your typical day like?
People like to imagine that my job involves patting my little dahlias on the head and thinking about plant combinations, but most of my day is given over to talking about process and work flow. I spend Mondays with the buyers. Tuesdays we plan how we are going to make the store look that week. I take off Wednesdays to spend with my little boy (my proudest accomplishment—I used to work non-stop, but now I have other, more important things to worry about). Thursdays I leave open for meetings and special projects and thinking about marketing initiatives, and Friday is our big merchandising day. We do about half of our business on the weekend, so come Saturday morning, our store needs to look as good as it will ever look.

Who are your role models?
I dropped out of high school in ninth grade, and my second-ever job was for these twin sisters who owned a little salad dressing company. They taught me everything—they even let me help with marketing and go to trade shows. Everything I knew about running a small business when I started, I’d learned from them. They believed in running a company that was in line with their personal ethics, so that has always been a guiding light for me. Of course, I have retail idols, too. For creating a really special environment, David Allen at Artefact Design and Salvage is one of my heros. Rob Forbes, the genius behind Design Within Reach, is a mentor to me. Then I have heroes in the landscaping world like Andrea Cochran, Bernard Trainor, and Brandon Tyson—his plant combinations are like nobody else’s in this world. If I were a really, really brilliant landscape designer, I would be Brandon Tyson.

What is the greatest challenge of your job?
The greatest challenge of the job aside from the whole work/life balance is definitely figuring out how to run a professional organization having had little professional experience myself. I’ve never had many jobs before this one, and I haven’t been managed by very many people, so I’m drawing on nothing to try to create a functional place for creative people to work. I’m really determined to make it fun, respectful, and focused on the goal of creating a magical experience for our customers. Figuring out how to do that—even with all of these brilliant people—is really hard.

Many people must tell you this, but with a name like Flora Grubb, it seems as if you were destined for this kind of work. Do you feel this is in any way true?
All my siblings have Biblical names: Rebecca, Moses, Joseph and Jonathan, but I was named after my great grandmother. It is hard now to imagine doing anything else. I had a really crappy primary education, which set me up for having a really crappy secondary education, and so if all of that had gone differently, maybe I would’ve been a landscape architect, but I can’t imagine a different course for my life, and I feel profoundly lucky. If this was destined, something really went my way.