Lifelong gardener Kari Copple doesn’t do anything halfway. She first got into growing cut flowers because of her three children.
“I would pick flowers from my garden for events at my kids’ school, and then I came up with the idea for a little cutting garden out in the field,” she says.
And it grew from there, along pathways and rows, in tendrils and vines and lots and lots of compost. Copple is now the owner of a 2-acre flower farm as well as downtown Sonoma’s 7th St. Flowers, a cheery blue and white roadside stand launched in 2021.
Nearly every Saturday from March to October, Copple parks a cart filled with two dozen colorful bouquets for sale at the end of her driveway. The flowers go out at 8 a.m. — and by 11 a.m., she’s often completely sold out.
“When they were little, my kids would sell lemonade and hot chocolate out here, so we get good traffic, and people just love the bouquets,” she says.
Plus, it’s a way to stay on top of the goings-on in the neighborhood. “I sit out with the cart, and I get to meet all the dogs. It’s a doggy world out there,” she jokes.
Copple grew up in a family of vegetable farmers who ran an open-air produce market in downtown Portland, Oregon. “Farming is in my blood, but not flowers,” she explains.
She’s says she’s always been outdoorsy and has gardened for decades despite losing an arm and a leg in an electrical accident when she was 19 years old. She uses a motorized cart to move throughout her growing fields.
She and her husband, Scott, moved to Sonoma over 30 years ago and raised their children here, moving into their current home in 1998. At the time, Copple was in full-time parenting mode. She grew roses and peonies as a hobby and planted a gorgeous formal garden in the front of her home, but she never imagined flowers as a full-time job.
“It was my love of gardening that morphed into all this — I am still very enmeshed in that gardening world.”
In 2019, Copple took an intensive flower business course with Erin Benzakein of Floret Farms, one of the icons of the farmer-florist movement, and decided to launch into farming full-time. Soon, her back field was filled with carefully laid-out beds of cutting flowers in a riot of colors and forms, all timed to the climate and season.
It wasn’t necessarily the path she had in mind at the time.
“What person approaching 60 years old takes on a full-time farm? This is a labor-intensive job,” she says. “You have to have a passion for the flowers — the work will be daunting if you don’t love it.”
Copple’s growing fields have been laid out for accessibility, with wider-than-normal 4-foot pathways to accommodate her motorized cart.
“I think I love to do things that seem to other people like I couldn’t do them. I do think the disability does play a bit of a factor in a lot of things,” she reflects. “People thought I couldn’t have kids, and I have three. People thought I couldn’t do a big garden, and here I’m running a farm. I think there’s always that part of me that is like, there isn’t anything I can’t do if I really want to do it. I do like to be that person.”
Copple starts her day at 7 a.m., snipping blooms while the weather is cool and piling them into 5-gallon plastic buckets she carries back to the garage on her cart. She arranges bouquets in the garage, which can take several hours, and stores bouquets and extra blooms in a large floral cooler her husband built this spring in a small outbuilding. The cooler makes it much easier to keep cut blooms fresh and conditioned.
Except for two helpers who come in one day a week to do some of the heavier work, Copple does all the farming herself — planting, weeding, running irrigation and harvesting.
She finds meaning in the long list of daily chores, as the garden has always been where she finds her peace.
“It’s very zen-like. I’m just in the moment when I’m out there,” she says. “Whatever it is — whether I’m planting, whether I’m weeding, my focus is so specific. I just really like that. I’m also a worker bee. I’m always doing, doing, doing. My husband is, like, ‘Are you ever going to rest?’ But I’m a doer.”
It’s taken a few years to figure out exactly how to dial in her production. “I’ve just ramped things up so much — it’s all business out here now,” she says.
During the pandemic, as she was starting out, she often gave away flowers in front of the house to help bring cheer to the neighborhood. As the business grew, she considered having a wholesale stand at the big flower market in San Francisco, but she didn’t want to be getting up at 2 a.m. to haul buckets into the city. And she’s not interested in becoming an event florist taking on large weddings — but she will create casual arrangements for small parties and take custom orders in addition to arranging bouquets for the Saturday cart.
Selling to the community has proven both rewarding and sustainable at this point in her life, when she wants to be busy but also have time outside of the farm. She became a grandmother recently, and last summer, Copple took a couple weeks off to fulfill a lifelong dream of visiting iconic British gardens like Great Dixter and Sissinghurst Castle.
“I could do more, but there’s a work-life balance here for me. I want to enjoy life — my kids and my grandson. I want to have time to bike and walk with friends in the morning.”
Though she’s lived in downtown Sonoma for decades, flowers have brought Copple a deeper sense of community and family. Copple has been a mentor to a local ninth grader for the past five years, and her mentee loves being in the garden. Copple’s son and two daughters sometimes mind the stand and built the website.
A fellow florist often comes by on Wednesdays so they can harvest blooms together, and high-end designers like Sonoma’s Anne Appleman often pop by. They know they can hit Copple up for beautiful, locally grown material.
In July and August, she’ll have tons of vivid summery offerings — sunflowers, zinnias, amaranth, lisianthus, dahlias and late roses, all in colorful mixed garden bouquets and posies.
Lots of folks have a garden in this area, so she tries to grow varieties that are a little unusual, a little bit more difficult to source. A good bouquet means she needs variety in what she grows — taller spiky flowers, focal points, supporting characters and plenty of pretty foliage.
Arranging and stocking the cart is still the part of the business Copple loves the best. “This is all by word of mouth,” she says. “It was all like, ‘Hey, there’s a flower cart popping up on Seventh Street East.’”
“I get a lot of joy out of people getting joy out of the flowers.”
Kari Copple, 7th Street Flowers, 19885 Seventh St. East, Sonoma. 707-287-0589, 7thstflowers.com. Email or call ahead for custom bouquets. Flower cart with bouquets for sale on Saturday mornings through October.