After developers gentrified her old neighborhood, cherished plant shop owner starts fresh
On any given weekend, Degnan Boulevard, bookmarked by West 43rd Street, vibrates with activity. As you walk down the street, the sound of African drums blends into Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” The music comes from massive speakers propped beside various street vendors: people selling clothes, books, cannabis, sea moss and more.
If you continue this casual stroll north, you’ll eventually spot an orange wall with green accents. The vendors’ music — Stevie Wonder is playing now — flows through its low gate. As you follow it, you step into a verdant oasis. A wide open green space big enough for two boys to pass their soccer ball back and forth gives way to a greenhouse teeming with “wishlist plants.” And if you’re brave enough to step deeper into the lot, yet clearly not confident in ascertaining a Golden Pothos from a Pothos N’Joy, a woman with a warm smile will approach you kindly.
“Welcome to the Plant Chica. Have you visited us before?”
In spring 2023, developers in the quickly gentrifying West Adams neighborhood handed Sandra Mejia a 90-day eviction notice on the lease for her plant store, the Plant Chica, a business she started in 2018. Having a bricks-and-mortar store was a dream for the onetime medical assistant. Therefore, Mejia had to reckon with whether to open herself up to more emotional turmoil as she searched for a new location to reopen in.
“We were super sad about losing the space and we were having a really hard time letting go of it,” said Mejia, who co-owns the Plant Chica with her husband, Bantalem Adis. “I felt like I was never going to find anything as special as that space was — not just for me but for the community.”
While the Plant Chica continued to complete online orders after the eviction, Mejia doubted whether to continue the business at all. Business had been slow during winter 2023; and although the community poured into a GoFundMe page dedicated to helping the store stay afloat, Mejia and her husband had sold or given away nearly their entire inventory before closing. “Should I be doing this?” Mejia asked herself.
Ironically, it was a 2023 Times story published about the store’s eviction plight that led Mejia to a solution. Robbie Lee, interim chief executive officer of the Black Owned and Operated Community Land Trust, read the article and thought Mejia might be a good fit for what his organization was trying to build in Leimert Park, the heart of Black Los Angeles.
“The energy that she brought to the area that she was at in West Adams was something that we specifically felt would be a good energy for Leimert,” Lee said. “She seemed to have some really strong ties to the South L.A. community and she seemed to also have an interest in being a part of a community that was really tied to a community of color and culture. And so we felt that it would be a good fit to try to help support her in identifying a space.”
At first, Lee showed Mejia a few bricks-and-mortar options on Degnan Boulevard, but they didn’t quite fit the greenhouse feel Mejia was looking for. Then Lee walked Mejia over to an empty lot managed by Community Build Inc., the L.A.-based nonprofit offering education, training, support services and employment placement assistance. The lot had previously been rented for various community and private events throughout the year, but otherwise it sat unattended to.
Reopening would take a lot of sacrifice — namely, in March 2024, Mejia and her husband had to give up their place and move in with her parents to save money. But Mejia instantly knew she found the shop’s new home.
“It feels like the space was literally sitting here waiting for us because it cannot be any more perfect for us,” she said.
After signing the lease in June 2024, the Plant Chica reopened in Leimert Park Village in October.
Originally, the Plant Chica store, which opened on Jefferson Boulevard in West Adams in 2021, had been an old auto body shop that was retrofitted to be a greenhouse. But with the open lot in Leimert Park, Mejia could craft the plant shop of her dreams: a big dome-style greenhouse designed to be weather-resilient.
“It just feels so magical, especially when the sun is hitting the greenhouse, the way the sun bounces on the leaves,” Mejia said. “I always also wanted rocks, which I know is something so small, but to me, to be able to hear people walking on rocks is so therapeutic.”
The new space is also special for another reason: The open space allows Mejia to more easily facilitate the community events and collaborations she is well-known for.
“Most people see a plant shop,” said Jasmine Clennon, 36, a regular customer and friend of the store. “We see a communal space so we can come together.”
Clennon knows Mejia through their kids and recalls Mejia turning the new shop’s lawn into a Halloween party for the kiddos after trick-or-treating. Other hallmark Plant Chica events include queer poetry readings hosted by Cuties Los Angeles, yoga classes hosted by Black Women’s Yoga Collective, and of course, the store’s popular Adopt-a-Plant series.
“How do I say this without getting emotional?” said Clennon on a recent trip to the plant store as her school-aged daughter played at her feet. “Seeing her resiliency, opening it back up and specifically being intentional about it being in a Black community, is great.”
This significance is also not lost on Mejia, who shared that the transplant identities of many of the business owners in West Adams precluded her from feeling connected to them.
“In West Adams, I was trying to create community, and it was kind of exhausting,” she said. “There’s already so much culture here [in Leimert Park]. I just get to add to that.”
Mejia added that she feels exceptionally seen and supported in Leimert Park, which lends itself to a natural reciprocity on her part.
“A lot of businesses will take, take, take and not put back into the neighborhoods they’re in,” she said. "But I think it’s different when you’re from the neighborhood. You’re like ‘No, I grew up here. I want to see this neighborhood thrive.’”
For her part, Mejia created maps of the historic Degnan strip to give to her customers. The idea, she said, is “Don’t just get back in your car after visiting the Plant Chica. Here’s this map. Go support the other businesses.”
That peer-support includes businesses found on the Plant Chica’s own lawn.
Amorette Brooms, 47, ran a storefront on Pico Boulevard for over a decade before financial shortfalls in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic forced her to close down. When the Plant Chica reopened in Leimert Park, Brooms reached out to Mejia via social media to see if they could collaborate in some way. She was shocked when Mejia offered her a free space to sell her merchandise instead.
“I was like ‘What do you mean you’re not going to charge me?’” said Brooms, who sells planters. “It kind of restores my faith in humanity.”
Today, four businesses, Brooms’ Queen, Louis LIV Design, Golden Garden and Plant Man P, sell their products rent-free at the Plant Chica. The retail model allows small business owners to fully sell through their inventory without falling prey to pop-up events that typically leave them in the hole, Brooms said.
Now Brooms, in turn, is planning to bring her Tiny Plant Desk series — a play on NPR’s popular Tiny Desk series — to the Plant Chica. Which for Mejia is exactly the point of giving back.
“I feel like people support us so much because they know that if they spend money here, there’s going to be an awesome event that’s going to be free to the community, which is hard to get,” Mejia said.
In addition to helping customers with their plant selections, Mejia also rings them up at the register and then busies herself with tidying and organizing the shop. She has no employees, but she still has ambitious goals. Two weeks ago, she officially filed the paperwork for her nonprofit, co-founded with Brooms, Plant Power to the People. And she’s hoping to organize a Los Angeles Earth Day Festival, hosted in Leimert Park, by April. To outsiders, Mejia's pursuits and projects may seem overwhelming, but where Mejia had doubts about her future a year ago, she now knows she’s exactly where she’s meant to be.
“People are always like ‘Oh, you do so much for your community,’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, but my community does a lot for me too,’” she said, explaining that community members cleaned her wind-strewn lawn in the aftermath of the Eaton and Palisades fires while she was busy organizing donations for Altadena residents who lost their homes. “I’m being so fulfilled and feeling like I’m walking in my purpose, and as a person, I don’t know that there’s anything greater than to be like, damn, I love what I do.”
It’s impossible to not feel this love — this sense of community — when you walk through the Plant Chica’s Degnan Avenue gate humming the soulful tunes — Luther Vandross is playing now — of the vendors outside.
“I feel like everything is a lesson,” Mejia said. “[My son] saw us open on Jefferson and he cut the ribbon then. And then, he cut the ribbon again here in Leimert Park. I think that was super special because it shows him that if things sometimes may not go your way, you can’t just give up. You got to keep going and find new ways.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
