Several local flower shops have closed in the last few years, but Lily’s Garden is thriving. The three-woman partnership of Harriet Held, Genevieve Stoyak, and Amanda Steele has moved into the house next door to Zingerman’s Next Door, along with an entourage that includes a mother, five children, and a dog, various members of which also live there. (They can do the live-work thing because the house is zoned commercial/residential; some might remember it from the 1990s as the Pelletier Gallery.) But there is no longer a Lily on board. The three bought the business from Lily Kittle in 2003, when it was in Kerrytown. They moved it to Marketplace Shops on the other side of the Farmers Market, and in July they opened in their new location.
“This is my mom. She’s part of the story,” says Held, introducing Janet Chin, who is sitting in the large kitchen eating a bowl of soup that Held calls “hillbilly stew.”
“You call it hillbilly stew. Where I come from in Floyd County, Virginia, people call it stacked vegetables,” Chin says equably. “You put in layers of vegetables and the meat on top …”
“We never in a million years thought we could get this building because it was so awesome,” says Stoyak, arranging a hospital bouquet on the kitchen counter.
Chin, a retired librarian, helped them pull it off by selling her house in what she calls “the high-rent
student-hovel neighborhood–there’s always buyers for those.” She and Held live upstairs. Held’s children live there part-time, and Steele’s two kids also spend a lot of their free time there. They especially love the enclosed back courtyard, which gives the new Lily’s Garden its own secret garden. A dog named Arthur completes the household. When a customer comes in, Arthur hurls himself to the floor, legs-in-the-air submission posture, and rests his head beseechingly on the client’s shoes. “Yeah, he pretty much does that with everyone,” Held says.
Held explains, a little counterintuitively, that having a full-service flower shop rather than an online or by-appointment-only business actually suits the current unstable economy, allowing customers to be spontaneous. “We find that we’re trending more toward small, intimate events with less planning. People can just walk in and say, ‘We’re going to be married at the courthouse tomorrow.’ These days people don’t know what they’ll be doing in a year.”
Lily’s Garden, 414 Detroit St., 663-2693. Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m.-6 p.m., Sat. 9 a.m.-4 p.m., closed Sun. www.lilysgarden.com
