Dear Plant Lovers –
I’m struggling with how to begin this year-end update. Maybe it’s the 55-degree weather and the undeniable smell of spring and fresh, wet soil in the air (delightfully similar to our new Petrichor candle, Botany’s first custom candle fragrance which has been flying off the shelves this month). Normally I love these days because they remind us spring is just around the corner and they give us something to hope and to dream for. The fact it’s coming on the heels of a polar vortex bomb and deadly blizzard just a few days ago is perhaps what’s giving me this feeling of whiplash. What day is it? What season is it?
Plant lovers are perpetual planners. In our mind, we’re always at least a season ahead of the one we’re in now as we decide what we’ll grow, where, and how. What worked for us this year and what did we enjoy… what’s worth repeating? What didn’t work out as we’d hoped and therefore needs more consideration?
This cycle of perpetual planning can often bring me out of being present in this moment, right now. I’m so focused on the future I often forget to soak up everything in the present. Often I look to my plants and garden as a means to ground me, to remind me where I’m supposed to be, what I’m supposed to be doing, and what I should take time to appreciate right now. This is one of their super powers, after all – caring for plants helps us mark the passage of time while grounding us in the now. No small thing.
When the weather does what it’s been doing this year, with a snowstorm in early November followed by a thaw, then nothing until a massive blizzard two days before Christmas followed by another thaw, the seasonal rhythm I often look to for balance feels… off (because, newsflash, it is). Our climate and our world are undeniably changing around us, and in these moments, it’s easy to feel helpless and powerless and alone. How can we possibly hope to overcome a global force like climate change when we don’t even know what day it is?
In these moments when I begin to feel frustrated and overwhelmed and hopeless, I find solace and comfort in choosing to focus on what I can control. If you’ve not yet tried this, I highly recommend it, as it’s perhaps one of the easiest and most radical ways I’ve found to reverse a negative mindset and to feel excited, hopeful, and energetic again. I think you’ll agree, these are feelings we could all use in greater abundance, especially as we head in to a new year with limitless opportunities and challenges before us. C’mon fresh start energy.
In this spirit, here are some things we’re looking forward to in 2023 at Botany. Since we’re plant lovers, we make no small plans, and frankly, we prefer it that way. Our process of thinking about the future is intrinsically linked to the past: what worked, what didn’t, what could be better.
Revisit the 2022 Studebaker Talks
Perhaps nothing sums this up better than the Studebaker Talk I presented in October. It now lives as a moment in time, archived in memory and digital media, something we can revisit and share perpetually. It was a talk grounded in this continuum of time as I reflected on how I came to love plants, how we came to open our shop, and our plans for the future. I can’t wait to revisit it in a few years and compare where we are to where we thought we’d be. If you weren’t able to join us in the room that night, you can now catch all the talks online. They’re all worth your time if you live in, believe in, and love South Bend as I do.
An Update on The Botany Block
A key moment of our Studebaker Talk was sharing our vision for what we call The Botany Block, a collection of several city lots adjacent to our current home at 909 Portage Avenue. We first shared our hopes and dreams for this project in early July leading up to Plant Pride (more on that soon).
Show of hands – how many of you have ever launched a small business? If you haven’t, here’s the quick inside scoop: you’ll never, ever, ever be bored. We had planned to acquire the first two properties (909 and 913 Portage Ave) before the end of 2023, and then we realized we needed to wait and see what a full year in this location would look like for us. There’s value in allowing something to cook for a while. Some of my favorite dishes are always better the next day once the flavors have time to mingle and mix.
With this in mind, we took a momentary step back from taking that big step into purchasing our space. Rest assured; this remains high on our radar heading in to 2023. As a show of good faith and because we can’t help ourselves, you might have noticed the first bones of the new public garden space coming together in the lot next to our shop as we planted the first trees and shrubs this fall. These plants will form the backdrop and the armature of diverse, abundant, and resilient plantings that will follow next spring. Ultimately, a space to learn, gather, and connect with nature and one another will follow in the months and years to come.
Save the Date: Plant Pride 2023
We value convening and community, which is why we love creating opportunities for our community to come together to learn, celebrate, and connect. We took our first steps into major events in 2022, and Plant Pride was a signature offering. A celebration of all the ways we grow together and the anniversary of when we first opened our shop in July 2021, Plant Pride will return on July 15, 2023.
In many ways it will feel similar to what you experienced in 2022, with a daytime block party featuring a maker market, food vendors, games, and live art and music, and an evening portion that’s part celebration and part community visioning. We’re already working on this year’s program, and we can’t wait to share it with you in the new year. (P.S. If you want to relive last year’s event, you can check out the photo album here).
Support our Work in 2023
I’ve always said Botany is a for-profit business with a not-for-profit heart. This means we define our profit by more than just the dollars in our bank account. We see the sum total health, happiness, connection, and safety we help to cultivate in our community as our ultimate product and measure of success. That said, by the nature of the culture in which we operate and live, this full suite of work requires dollars in order to function in the first place. We have to pay our staff and keep the lights on if we want to do good things.
When you purchase anything from our shop, when you attend an event, when you collaborate with us to design a native landscape, when you become a season sponsor, when you volunteer for our Green Corps, or when you make a contribution with a Botany Backer subscription, all of these are ways you bring energy and fuel to our mission.
As the saying goes, it absolutely takes a village, and we’re grateful you’re ours.
To our nearly 40 Botany Backers, a special thanks to you for joining us this year. We hope to welcome new Backers in the year to come, and we’ll be making some intentional moves to do so, including hosting a focus group in late February and (here’s the part you don’t want to scroll past), we’re also increasing the discount you receive with us as part of your Backer membership. All Backers will enjoy an additional 5% off with every purchase in 2023, bringing the discount tiers to 10%, 15%, and 20% off any purchase based on your Backer level of support. You can become a Backer here.
We’ve also rolled out a new Season Sponsorship program. This is our invitation to fellow local and independent businesses to partner up and support our work in a way that’s mutually beneficial for us all. We’ve crafted a program we hope will allow you to choose your own adventure, and the funds we raise through sponsorship will go directly to underwriting our community programs and events which we strive to keep free, open, and accessible. You can now become a sponsor on our website, and our first deadline for 2023 contributions is January 15.
If you’ve stuck with me this long, thank you. I know this is a lot to digest, and I appreciate your time and attention. I’m grateful for your partnership, your support, your encouragement, and your enthusiasm. From the beginning, we’ve built Botany in a way that would allow us to pivot, change, and mold ourselves to become the plant shop you need and want us to be for South Bend and beyond. We started small to be sure what we were doing was something our area needed and wanted in the first place, and after 18 months of operation and growth, I’m thrilled to know your answer: a resounding yes.
I hope we continue to delight, inspire, and surprise you in 2023. I hope we continue to share beautiful things, to elevate and empower those around us, to tell deeper stories, to make bold choices, to not be afraid to fail, and to constantly be open to learn. I hope we make hard decisions. I hope we celebrate special moments and special people.
I hope we continue to make you proud.
I want to close out this 2022 recap and 2023 preview with a quote from a podcast I recently enjoyed from an episode of Cultivating Place. Hosted by the incomparable Jennifer Jewell, she shared these words during an August 2020 interview with Black in the Garden podcast host, author, and leader, Colah B. Tawkin. (You can listen to the full episode here.)
The voices we hear, the images we see, the conversations we listen to or even engage in ourselves: they construct the world as we know it in our brains, our hearts, our fears, and our aspirations. And that “world as we know it” can either constrain or engender all possibility from there.
Representation matters. Representations matter, for the represented and the representers, for the listeners and the speakers, for the garden and the gardeners.
Representation matters.As I listen, as I read, as I look, and as I cultivate my own garden, I need to make sure I’m always asking myself, who is represented here? Whose voice, whose interests, whose benefit, is represented?
We are the gardeners. We of all people know, in our bones, that the healthiest and most resilient and beautiful gardens are those with the greatest representation of biodiversity. Interdependent, playing off of and balancing one another, a composition of community and collaboration that generates energy and life from energy and life.
Let’s grow something beautiful, together. Thank you and onward, plant lovers.
With Gratitude,
Ben Futa | Botany Founder and CEO