It makes a lot of sense that Mother Natives — Sac’s newest nursery that focuses on plants native to California — is located near an alley and behind a hair salon in Midtown. We mean, that’s the sort of place we would expect to find plants like the California poppy in the City of Trees.
To be precise, the nursery is located at 2311 S St. on a concrete courtyard shared with Addison’s Bicycle Repairium — owned by a longtime friend of Mother Natives’ owner, Shevaun Zakhir. Shevaun, who’s worked as a ceramicist for several years, also co-founded an art studio that the nursery shares a space with.
Again, this just makes a whole lot of sense to us: The network of friends and businesses, all rooted in Sacramento, sounds like the workings of an ecosystem.
While a native plant nursery itself isn’t groundbreaking (the California Native Plant Society opened its Elderberry Farms Native Plant Nursery in Rancho Cordova in 2007), being able to take a walk around the Grid, stumble into Mother Natives, and walk away with coyote mint, California fuchsia, or lupine strikes us as revelatory.
Bespoke products like handmade seed bombs — clumps of dirt with native plant seeds to “bomb” a patch of your yard (as of today, these are sold out but more are on the way) — or the one-of-a-kind, hand-dyed gardening gloves are also available, establishing a distinctive, community-sourced atmosphere to Mother Natives.
Which highlights one of the shop’s strengths: being so well-positioned in Sacramento helps the nursery feel like a native plant community center, with Shevaun saying that she would love to offer workshops + classes in the future.
When we toured the space not long after its launch in mid-February to learn more about it, we also got to learn a lot about its owner’s amazing story.
Shevaun (whose favorite native plant is white sage) said she’s always wanted to do something with plants, tracing her interest back to gardening with her mom here in the River City as a child.
Later, she studied horticulture at Merritt College in Oakland, where not too long after she thought about opening a mobile plant shop — she just “wasn’t jazzed enough about houseplants” to go through with it.
She really centered the inspiration from her dad’s initiative and work ethic — admiring him and how hard he worked to provide for his family as an immigrant from Sudan (she told us he’s opened somewhere between ten and fourteen different businesses, with his favorite being a propane delivery company that served the greater Sacramento area).
Yet it wasn’t until she started working for Brodeur Landscapes — a company that takes a “sustainable and regenerative approach to California native plant landscaping” and has worked with the city on its River Friendly program — that everything clicked for Shevaun.
She explained that landscaping with native plants, which can restore things like the health of soil, felt more fulfilling than anything before.
“Working with native plants, the purpose was beyond just plants and pushed towards something more fulfilling,” Shevaun said. “These plants have co-evolved with us — planting natives was giving something back to my community and making a difference.”
You can really feel all that in Mother Natives — a nursery made by + for the Sacramento community.
