After a car crashed into Tacoma plant store, owner continues ‘slow flowers’ movement
A couple weeks after a car crashed through the wall of a plant store on South Tacoma Way, the owner of The Fernseed said business is recovering, although gunfire and other incidents continue to affect small businesses owners in Tacoma.
Around about 12:30 a.m. Sept. 3, Katherine Raz said, she awoke to an alarm notification that several of the front windows of her business had been shattered, spilling plants and dirt all over the floor. The front wall had caved in as a car crashed through a display, resulting in about $3,000 worth of damage.
“It wasn’t really obvious on the security footage to me what had happened,” she said. “I just saw everything in disarray.”
Raz said she was grateful no one was seriously injured or killed in the crash, but she had to close the shop for four days, a move she said was challenging but one the small business was able to weather. The Fernseed also has a location on 2703 N. Proctor St.
Evidence of the crash was still present Thursday in a boarded-up window and cracks along the front wall. The roar of traffic at the nearby intersection of South Tacoma Way and South 54th Street hummed in the background as shoppers perused potted plants, cards and fresh flowers.
According to the police incident report, a 19-year-old Auburn man was arrested and cited with a misdemeanor for reckless driving on Sept. 3 after he told police he was driving faster than 60 miles per hour when he lost control of the vehicle, hitting multiple cars parked along the east side of South Tacoma Way, a light pole and two buildings, including Fernseed. The posted speed limit for that area is 25 miles per hour, according to the report.
The Auburn man was also charged with misdemeanor for having a device on the vehicle that flipped his Washington license plate with a fake California plate, which was later found in the debris, according to the incident report. Devices like that “are known to be used by street racers to avoid anyone capturing their registered license plate,” the report said. “Based on the collision damage to the vehicle and the surrounding damage it was only possible for the fake California plate to be displayed at the time of the collision.”
The man told police he was uninjured and one of his passengers was later transported to St. Joseph Medical Center for minor injuries.
Raz said she’s seen cars rev their engines and speed through that intersection before, and some have done doughnuts. On Thursday she pointed out where bullets traveled through her windows and lodged in her walls and wooden shelves. The gunfire happened at night when no one was in the store. In February a bullet sped through a wall and into the workroom in the back, hitting a shelf.
“[It] landed on our postal scale, which I thought was kind of hilarious, but at the same time after two days I took this moment and just kind of broke down about it, because my kids and I were in here the night before, like 8:30 at night,” she said. “And then the place where it went through the wall, there’s a desk — we sit there all the time.”
Still, Raz said she doesn’t feel like South Tacoma Way is a dangerous place and said issues like gun violence and street racing are connected to larger systemic problems like the lack of affordable housing and cost-of-living crisis. Since the crash, many people in the community have stepped in to help, buying plants and flowers to offset the costs of repairs and lost revenue, and spreading the word about her business.
“We just want to be part of the solution,” Raz said. “We love this neighborhood. I love it here. The buildings are beautiful. I used to drive around here all the time when I moved here from Chicago. I thought, ‘That stretch of street has a lot of character. It’s so close to the commuter rail. It’s just such a cool area.’ We don’t feel unsafe here.”
Issues like gunfire hit small businesses hard, Raz said, because the owner has to deal with the subsequent costs and repairs.
“It’s such a weirdly high-risk job sometimes. No one’s getting hazard pay to run a cash register to sell plants,” she said. “And I don’t want people to feel like their safety is threatened. And for the most part, they don’t. But I think things have just gotten a little weird since the pandemic, you know? People are just feeling like they want to drive really fast; they want to get in fights.”
Raz said the growing trend of people buying goods from Amazon or big box stores is the real culprit hurting small businesses.
“I think that people look at this like, ‘A car drove into your business, oh my God, that’s terrible.’ And I’m like, ‘The last year with the economy, that’s the real threat.’ So many of us are really just hanging in there by a thread,” Raz said. “I think the real challenge for a lot of people right now has been, we all saw a huge spike in sales post pandemic and then that just dried up real fast. So many small businesses are closing permanently. Just not worth it. And it’s not worth it because the upside is so little compared with what you are dealing with sometimes on the day-to-day.”
Fighting for the ‘slow flowers’ movement
Something that sets Fernseed apart from many other plant stores in the area is they don’t just sell houseplants, they sell locally sourced flowers.
Between 60 and 90 percent of the flowers sold at Fernseed are grown within 400 miles of Tacoma, Raz said.
“We try to source as much as possible from farms within Washington and backyard micro growers here in Tacoma, which is a little different from how a lot of florists do it because most flowers are flown in from places like Ecuador and Colombia,” she said.
Raz is part of the “slow flowers” movement, which seeks to reduce the environmental impact of the floral industry by connecting consumers with the source of their flowers more directly.
Oftentimes flowers are grown in mass in other countries, which usually don’t have the same labor and environmental protections as in the United States, she said. Then cut flowers are preserved with chemicals to keep them presentable before they’re shipped to the United States and delivered to their final destination.
“There’s a lot of plastic use, first of all, but there’s also a product called floral foam, which contains a lot of harmful chemicals. It’s the green stuff you see at the bottom of vases sometimes,” she said. “It has formaldehyde in it and other carcinogens [that] can cause cancer and other illnesses.”
At Fernseed, Raz doesn’t use floral foam, opting to use chicken wire to help the flowers stay upright in their vases. The flowers are also seasonal and aren’t available all times of the year. They source from about 50-60 farms and growers, some of whom simply grow flowers in their backyard, Raz said.
“We try to do almost like a farm-to-table approach with floral,” she said.
The shop also sells handmade pottery and housewares, has a seasonal self-serve “Stem Bar” where customers can build their own bouquet.
Employees can pot and repot plants, and floral designers build bouquets for pickup or delivery. Floral arrangements for any occasion start around $35, and the most expensive one is about $175, Raz said. Customers can peruse options online or in person.
Fernseed also does floral arrangements for weddings and events. Raz said intimate elopement flowers can be arranged as soon as the week of. Monthly flower delivery subscriptions start at $154.
If you go
▪ 5243 South Tacoma Way, open daily from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
▪ 2703 North Proctor Street; open Monday, Thursday, Friday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed Tuesday and Wednesday, open Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Website: https://thefernseed.com/
This story was originally published September 22, 2023 at 5:15 AM.
