On Annie's Annuals Closing

And what it's like to lose a place you love

Bay Area gardeners lost Annie’s Annuals today, when it unexpectedly closed. The doors were shut before a post even went on Instagram, and like many other people, I am shocked. Annie’s helped me grow into a plant person. Annie’s blog changed my view of buying plants. "Don’t you think it’s sad that taller varieties, with all their grace, lovely form and charm are being pushed out (and forgotten), only to be replaced with squat, charmless blobs of color?” Annie wrote 13 years ago. Yes, I do. And this post turned me against the junky breeding strategies represented in your average Home Depot garden center, and made me aware that there was another way.

An ode like this must begin with at least two laments. First, a lament for the other losses in this world. Right now, there are people battling illness, trying to survive brutal wars, and trapped inside famines. It is a privilege to feel a loss at the closing of a local business. Second, a lament for the employees of Annie’s. Some of them have worked there for a very long time, and all of them that I encountered over the years felt like fellow travelers in this path towards plant understanding. They can’t just go get another job at another Annie’s because there really isn’t another Annie’s. I’m rooting for them all.

But tonight, let me just stay in the feeling of what Annie’s meant to me and what it taught me.

Every trip to Annie’s felt like a pilgrimage. Up 80, as if a commuter going home, then through a swath of the small city of Richmond, past roadside pupusa stands, a taqueria in every mini-mall, storefront iglesia side-by-side with rock-walled Baptist church. Cross the tracks heading west and you arrived. Plantitas in row after row.

Few betrayed any hint of what they could become with time and proper care. It was a $6.95 leap of faith every time you dropped one in your cart, based solely on a small picture and a lively description, which crackled with the same bright nerdy energy as a bookseller’s note. At Home Depot, if you go to buy marigolds, the tiny dwarf plants are covered with blossoms. Those flowers came at a cost to the development of the rest of the plant, but they market the product at the point of sale.

Annie’s was about that plant life and they did not pull those tricks. You could buy something 3 inches tall that would turn into a massive plant. But you had to trust the plant, a lesson I learned through the fancy poppies.

I prefer the purpliest blackest reds in the largest sizes. (Don’t judge.) And there are whole lineages of these creatures sold basically only at Annie’s. I took Annie’s advice to get their seedlings what seemed far too early. Like January. So, I braved the blustery foggy winds and loaded my cart with hope for spring. You’re gonna do great, I thought, as I lovingly squeezed each new plant baby and dropped it into its new home on pillows of expensive soil. I love you, I thought, as if kissing a cheek at drop-off, and it was true.

And then the waiting began. Each day, I’d putter around to check on them. They were doing well. Green, healthy, happy plants. Week after week. Yes! It was always like that with Annie’s stuff. But I knew that some were supposed to reach 4, 5 feet tall, and for the most part, they were sitting at ground level. Did I detect some thickening in their leaves? I did. They seemed more solid in their homes, if I accidentally smacked them with a hose (sorry!). But they did not grow up.

I won’t say I was frustrated, but I was perplexed. Then, we got that kind of beautiful February weather in California that is a shard of somewhere else’s summer. You know how it goes: People emerge onto porches and turn to face the sun in their shorts, without their hats, soaking in the sun. Vitamin D surges. You walk back inside, screen door smacking, and anyone who touches you can feel the warmth on your skin.

Surely, then, that weather would be the signal. Plants are known, really, to take temperature as their primary environmental cue, the phenologists contend.

BUT the weather was not the signal. In some cases, the poppies began to grow upwards, but they did not bloom. It took months, really, all the way into April before any of them did. And then, plants separated by just a few feet took wildly different paths. One poppy spent four whole months growing a stalk sturdy as Iowa corn, put out one impossibly beautiful bloom, and then died. Another turned into a monster, contorting into wild shapes as I tried in vain to keep it somewhat upright. It flowered dozens of times, gorgeous purple blooms that left behind key-lime-sized seed pods.

I was hooked. These Annie’s poppies were dynamic. They were not cookie-cutter Icelandic poppies so genetically entrained that their lives were nearly unalterable. I savored the difference and strangeness and inexplicability, the plasticity and resilience.

Sure, some of the variation in outcome was the type of poppy. Some of it was their positioning within the yard or the particular drainage or soil conditions or something that happened to a root underground. And that’s the point. When you get right down to it, the world is infinite, the factors that go into any living thing’s time fighting entropy are innumerable, and yet … life proceeds through thresholds and decision points. To bloom or not to bloom is the question every single day of a flowering plant’s life. Why and when and how does it choose (for this must be the word, right)? Have you ever seen an orchid come back from what was surely death and then create the most perfect specimens your eyes have ever beheld? Honestly, what the hell?

And we, too, in ourselves and through our institutions, are trying to live. Annie’s has closed up shop, for now, though the nursery’s somewhat inscrutable announcement portends that perhaps there will be some future. We all have to figure out when to grow, when to bloom, when to close. We don’t make these decisions unconstrained and sometimes the environment determines our fate.

But man, let me tell you. Annie’s has got to come back in some form.

Some local businesses are worth so much more to a community than their revenue numbers could ever show. I don’t know how to protect these places. I don’t think they are easily replaced. I worry the mechanisms of internet business are making them more precarious. But my years won’t be the same without Annie’s, without those sacred trips to the seedlings, without the knowledge and care of the people who worked there. I wish I’d had the chance to help them keep the doors open.