Photography by Jesse Waldman courtesy of Pistils Nursery.
While Portland, Oregon is still the creative hub of the Northwest, it also is experiencing a housing boom that can only be rivaled by San Francisco’s.
Mégan Twilegar founded Pistils in 2001 when the focus of her shop and landscape company was on growing outdoor plants and homesteading (they had chickens roaming the yard!).
The new solarium at Pistils, a space where indoor plants and living art thrives.
The solarium took two years to build from conception to completion and houses beautiful examples of rare indoor plants, mounted staghorn ferns, curated terrariums, kokedamas, and wabi kusa (multiple, semi-aquatic plants bound together into a kokedama and housed in a glass vessel).
The floor is made of 3,000 bricks salvaged from a house in southeast Portland.
The sink is from the Rebuilding Center, a reclamation yard just a few blocks from the shop and the central table, where all the terrariums are planted, is a single piece of tropical hardwood bought from a local wood reclamation shop.
The new solarium brings sunlight into the dark retail area.
The light in the new solarium has also meant that new plants can be grown at the nursery.
Now we’re able to grow a lot more things that need the sun,” says
“This is the plant that I remember watering for my mother when I was growing up, and I just love it. My mother’s plant was large and in a terra-cotta pot but there were these fleshy roots all over the base that I thought were fascinating,” said.
Even though Pistils has embraced the new indoor plant movement the shop hasn’t forgotten its roots.
The chickens are allowed to roam when their coop is being cleaned.