Washington native Jonathan Giese was already the CFO of a large hospital in Simi Valley by the time he was 29 years old. He’d attended Walla Walla University, majored in accounting (which surprised his family, who always assumed he’d do something more artistic), joined the hospital, and worked his way up. As he neared 40, the mid-life doubts set in.
“I liked the job because of the people, but the stress was a little bit much,” Giese says on a brisk January morning in the small but perfectly organized showroom on East Sunny Dunes Road. There is a wide variety of succulents both in the interior and exterior of the shop; all come from our own Southern California environs. Giese disdains the sizable and unnecessary carbon footprint of fleets of semi-trucks hauling tons of flowers and other decorative greenery across the country, when we have an extraordinary and diverse array of plant life literally growing at our doorsteps. “I was in line to become CEO and I just didn’t want to be that person who lived, ate, [and] breathed the hospital,” he says. “[I thought I had] a lot of friends at the hospital … when I left, but they didn’t care. It was a hard hit to my ego. I had to rebuild who I was and get in touch with who I was again. And while it was difficult, I'm glad I did it. Now, I get to do this and I'm loving it. I mean, it's still a lot of stress, but it's my own stress.”
Giese grew up on a farm, and his parents always maintained a garden. When he lived in Los Angeles, he had a huge garden in his backyard. “I’ve always loved succulents,” he says. “Why go to therapy when you can accomplish the same thing by spending $200 a week on plants? I think you can create beauty with succulents like you can with flowers. The difference is that flowers die within days. [Flowers] get flown up from South America, they get put in tons of water, processed, and put in a fridge. These guys don’t die.” He points to a round concrete pot that contains a diverse array of small cacti jewels. “This arrangement will stay exactly like this for a good month before it gets overgrown.”
The owner of PLANT This is a relative newcomer to the desert (but, obviously, not its flora). When Giese was selling his house in LA after resigning from his job, a friend suggested that he should check out Palm Springs. That was less than a year and a half ago, and Giese never looked back. He admits, though, that he didn’t immediately find his niche and was becoming bored when, one day, he drove down East Sunny Dunes Road. “I saw the rental sign and all the windows and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I think this is telling me I need to open a shop here,’” he says.
Giese, an A-type doer if there ever was one, designed the showroom himself; he mixed an off-white mid-century ceramic floor with rustic wood shelving he salvaged from an old olive farm in Hemet. Instead of driving down to Mexico and buying a U-Haul full of pottery to house his plants, Giese makes all of his pots from cement and concrete, using forms that he shapes himself. There is a brutalist beauty to the pots he fashions, which contrast and complement the exotic plants within them. He learned to make the pots through trial and error. (His dad is a general contractor, so Giese grew up knowing how to make things.) And he credits the designs to the influences that he gleans from the world around him and stores in his brain.
Giese admits that he spends little time in the shop because he is either making pots or advising clients about both small- and large-scale installations of succulents. “It’s actually really awesome,” he says of the consulting work he does with clients on their cactus gardens. “I always work with couples, and it seems like one really wants one thing and the other person wants something else,” he says with a laugh. Giese is quick to put his foot down on squabbling, mixed messages, and contrary communication.
“I tell them, ‘You’re going to have a really tall cactus in the middle of your patio because that’s the design I’m offering you. You came to me because you like what I do. Now, trust me.’”
If that sounds harsh, Giese is anything but. He simply has confidence and experience in arranging brilliant displays of succulents. And he also has a genuine love for his plants. Giese will be the first to admit that he doesn’t know either the popular names or Latin names of the plants. He learned to nurture and grow his succulents, he says, “by the way they respond to me.” And a lot of that confidence comes from an absolute love for what he does. A close examination of the shop reveals affirmations attached to arrangements that say, “I am love,” “I am peace," and “I am joy.”
“I’m a spiritual person,” Giese admits. “I tell people, ‘Take your plant home and name it.’ All these plants … they communicate with each other. If you really know plants, then you understand that they have feelings. They can feel when something is a threat. Look, we all have issues. I have issues. But, through plants and through seeing people transform and get really excited about a plant they’ve take[n] and grown, … when I witness that excitement, … that’s all I need to know.”
