Sunshine Plant Co. opens

Customer Christine Rowan shopped the selections at the Sunshine Plant Company recently. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Sunshine Plant Company opens its doors to houseplant lovers

Published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle Dec. 2, 2022.

By Barb Gorges

Just in time for the height of houseplant season, the Sunshine Plant Company opened its doors Oct. 13 at 600 W. 17^th Street, on Cheyenne’s West Edge.

Yes, I know, many houseplants live year-round indoors. But once outdoor gardening season is finished, it’s time to focus on houseplants.

The Sunshine Plant Company is a boutique specializing in houseplants: succulents, cacti, orchids, violets, bromeliads and other mostly tropical plants large and small. Customers can make requests.

The shop creates dish gardens and fairy gardens, terrariums, and self-watering planters. They will replant your plants for you. Commercial and residential plant maintenance is also part of the business plan.

The Sunshine Plant Company repurposes all kinds of containers as pots for plants. Photo by Barb Gorges.

With garage door-sized, south facing windows (it was an automotive shop once), this is the living room you wish you had. Co-owners Cylie and Alexa Blooding-Erickson describe the vibe as “modern Victorian.” No minimalism here, but a deep gold and green living room with comfy wing chairs. It gives you a better sense of a plant’s size to see them on a bookshelf or flourishing by the vintage dresser.

And if you like the hanging shelves, you can order a set for yourself. Alexa’s brother will make it for you.

Cylie and Alexa met at the University of Wyoming’s art department and after graduation (Cylie, international studies, and Alexa, sculpture with a minor in anthropology), they went off to see the wider world.

For Cylie, that included two years at Palmer Flowers in Fort Collins, Colorado, working in their extensive houseplant production greenhouse. For Alexa, inspired by gardening with her grandmother, it included accumulating one houseplant at a time, thoroughly researching it and learning to grow it before moving on to the next type.

Both had dreams of entrepreneurship someday, and when Alexa’s mom, Christina Blooding, offered to share half the 17^th Street location of her business, Flydragon Design Art Studio, a “paint and sip” enterprise, they jumped at the chance to come home. Cylie is a native of Pinedale and Alexa graduated from Cheyenne Central High School.

For now, their plants come from Denver-area vendors. The Colorado Front Range has a long history in horticulture. But in the future, Cylie hopes to propagate more plants.

With more than a nod to sustainability, all kinds of containers have been converted to pots. The vintage teacups in the cup and saucer sets have drainage holes drilled so they are safe for plants.

The most intriguing repurposing is based on a design found on the internet. It cuts a wine bottle off at the shoulders, inverts the neck, plants it with tiny plants and a wick that trails out the mouth of the bottle. The lower part of the bottle is partly filled with water with the inverted part placed on top. The wick keeps the plants in moist soil. There were already a lot of wine bottles on site from Flydragon’s paint and sip sessions.

Cylie shows off a wine bottle repurposed as a self-watering planter. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Coming up Dec. 17 is a Plant and Paint workshop – plant succulents and paint a desert scene to make them feel at home.

Dec. 22 there will be a plant swap. Everyone from the “Oops I Wet My Plants” Facebook group, with 2,300 mostly Cheyenne members, is looking forward to that. I met one of the members, Christine Rowen, at the shop. She has helped get the word out by designing the flyer. Like many of us, she couldn’t leave without taking home a new, intriguing plant – or two.

Alexa and Cylie encourage houseplant owners to bring in their plant problems – but either as photos or specimens safely sealed in plastic zip-locking bags to protect the plants in the shop.

Like other people answering the public’s plant questions, Cylie and Alexa find the most common problem is overwatering. Here’s the tip for most houseplants: don’t water again until the top half to one inch of soil feels dry.

When watering, never pour in more water than the saucer under the pot can hold. Wait a minute to see if there is water trickling into the saucer. If there isn’t, water a little more. When there is water in the saucer finally, dump it out and quit watering. Or just water your plants in the kitchen sink.

Alexa recommends pothos, spider plant and peace lily for beginners as they are the most forgiving. She also thinks of them as drama queens because when they get too dry, they wilt dramatically – but revive quickly.

If you are sure you have a black thumb, stop by anyway. The Sunshine Plant Company also carries plant-related locally made crafts and gifts, including locally made honey products.

Sunshine Plant Company

600 W. 17^th Street

Phone: 307-514-0028

Email: sunshineplantco.wyo@gmail.com

Facebook and Instagram: @sunshineplantco.wyo

Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Saturday,9 a.m.-4 p.m.

Fairy Gardens

Fairy Garden photographed at Fort Collins Nursery, Ft. Collins, Colorado

Published Jan. 23. 2013, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, “How to grow your own fairy garden: These tiny gardens help the imagination take sprout.”

 By Barb Gorges

Whimsy must be Susie Heller’s middle name. Her story-and-a-half-high front hall is painted with life-sized aspen trees, with three dimensional birds and animals in their branches.

Nearby, the top of a half-wall is a dry well full of house plants that serve as a playground for fairy figurines.

A ceramic bird or frog in a pot with a ficus or philodendron is not unusual for indoor gardeners, but imagine a container, anything from a clay pot to a two-foot-square shallow box, planted to invite a four or five-inch-tall fairy to visit. Think of a miniature garden at dollhouse scale, one inch equals a foot.

Little did I know how popular a pastime fairy gardening has become, both indoors and out, for children and adults. Many garden centers carry specially grown small plants and miniature garden furniture, implements and structures, as well as fairies. Some will even put together a garden for you.

The day I visited, Susie, a Laramie County Master Gardener, had a demonstration for me to show how easy it is to plant your own fairy garden. On her kitchen table was an old suitcase with the lid propped at 90 degrees to become a backdrop.

Fairy Garden in a pot, photographed at FOrt COllins Nursery, Ft. Collins, Colorado

Container

Typically, one would make sure the container has sufficient drainage holes, but being of a degradable material, Susie has chosen to line the suitcase with heavy, clear plastic—the kind that is sold near the upholstery fabrics at Jo Ann’s and Hobby Lobby. She’s folded it over the edges of the suitcase and clothes-pinned it temporarily in place. Later, after the garden has settled for awhile, she’ll trim the plastic and secure the edges with glue.

Soil

Whether a container has drainage or is terrarium-style like Susie’s, they all need a 1-inch layer of pea gravel where excess water can go. On top of that, use a thin layer of crushed charcoal to filter excess water and keep things fresh.

Next, Susie uses a layer of paper towel, the super strong kind, to make a barrier so that the potting soil will stay out of the gravel and charcoal. If you have some other permeable textile, such as a bit of weed barrier cloth left over from a landscape project, it would work also.

Finally, we get to the potting soil. Susie uses a commercial blend, but adds worm castings and diatomaceous earth, which has sharp edges that damage soft-bodied garden predators, but it also holds water well.

Plants

There are many miniature plants that can evoke a full size garden. Check out the fairy gardens at the greenhouse at the Paul Smith Children’s Village at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens. Last year Ft. Collins Nursery started carrying miniature plants specifically for fairy gardening, one of the employees said. They are offering classes this winter, described at www.fortcollinsnursery.com.

Small bonsai trees would be perfect, but so would a small asparagus fern which could shed some feathery, fairy-like shade. Look for small-leaved flowering herbs for shrubs. Blanket the bare potting soil with groundcovers such as mosses and baby’s tears, or use mulch. A variety of heights and textures are what you look for.

The plants should all have the same water and light requirements, but a plant can be separately potted and buried so that it can receive more, or less, water than its surroundings. You can erect a fanciful structure that shades a shade-lover.

Accessories

Now comes the fun, finding something to become the perfect garden bench, or bending a wire hanger into an arbor to support a vine.

While all kinds of accoutrements just for fairy gardens, even seasonal decorations, are available online and in garden centers or at hobby stores supplying dollhouse décor, Susie enjoys prowling local thrift stores, looking for things fairy-sized, like the small blue bowl that became a pond for this project. “This demands using your imagination,” Susie said. Check your junk drawer for inspiration.

Two things to keep in mind with accessories: they need to be water repellent, and they need a base to keep from sinking into the potting soil. Susie uses plastic cut from milk jugs and food container lids to put under furniture, then hides it with groundcover. For this project she will glue glass pebbles to plastic cut as a curving path across the garden.

To preserve wood, she brushes on melted paraffin (or even crayons for a little color) and bakes the item in the oven on very low heat, 175 degrees, until it penetrates.

For this particular garden, Susie is installing dried, yellow reindeer moss, one of the colors sold at hobby stores, as a temporary ground cover. It reminds me of rabbitbrush that blooms here on the prairie in the fall. It will help keep the soil moist while the ground cover gets established.

Lights and Water

Susie has decorated other fairy gardens with battery-operated LED lights and a tiny pump that adds a moving water feature. For the upright wall of her current suitcase project, she will install chicken wire and stuff it with sphagnum moss and shallow-rooted succulents to create a green wall. Or maybe she’ll paint a landscape backdrop.

Upkeep of a fairy garden requires no heavy laboring, just frequent watering, since the shallow containers can dry out fast; pruning to keep plants in scale; and fertilizing, perhaps monthly. The gardens also require at least six hours of sunlight or artificial daylight.

Susie finds making the gardens more fun than their upkeep so she frequently makes gifts of her creations. She will be sharing her experience by teaching a class at the county fair this summer.

Let’s not forget what makes these “fairy” gardens and not, say, “dinosaur” gardens, though those may appeal to other children (of any age) when they are planted with Jurassic-looking succulents like jade plants.

Leaving room for fairies

“You need to leave room in your garden for fairies,” said Susie. Not the old folkloric kind that kidnap children, but the flower fairies made popular by Englishwoman Cicely Mary Barker through her poems and illustrations originally published between 1923 and 1960. Her sister ran a kindergarten in their home, providing child models Barker would dressed in butterfly-winged costumes. She passed on many of her drawings to the delighted parents.

 Today Barker’s legacy continues online at www.flowerfairies.com and her fairies, and their kin, are found everywhere people believe in their happy magic.

Some Fairy Garden Plants:

Trees (including any species promoted for bonsai)

Abutilon (flowering maple)

Asparagus fern

Butterfly palm

Coffee plant

Creeping fig

Euphorbia “Hip Hop”

Ficus Benamina

Ming aralia

Pencil cactus

Persian Queen geranium

Shrubs

Small-leaved herbs

False heather (Cuphea hyssopifolia)

Ground cover

Moss

Baby tears

Creeping thyme

Vines

Iron vine

Bridal veil vine

Asparagus vine

Angel vine

Jasmine

Monkshood vine