During the pandemic, as people searched for new hobbies to fill their time, plant people found their coping mechanisms in shades of green. Six years later, it’s become a lifestyle. From propagated pothos cuttings traded among friends to curated plant shelves filling Instagram feeds, Millennials and Gen Z have turned caring for greenery into a small but meaningful ritual.
In Amarillo, that cultural shift is fueling a quiet but growing ecosystem of small, plant-focused boutiques and greenhouses. These local plant shops compete with national chains by offering knowledge, curation and community, tapping into a generation hungry for a connection to living things.
Nettie’s Greenhouse
“Before we opened this place, we were just like everybody else,” Caleb James says from his chair at a small wrought-iron table inside Nettie’s Greenhouse. “I mean, we had no experience, no knowledge other than just keeping our house plants alive.”
Annette “Nettie” Trimble, James’s mother, business partner and co-owner, kept a little greenhouse in her backyard that her kids helped put together. Every winter, her plants would freeze. She was sick of it. So, she asked her son—who had been running a heating and air company for five years—to quit his job and help her renovate the greenhouse that would become Nettie’s. James agreed to it. They got certified through the horticultural program at Amarillo College, which took them two and a half years.
Nettie’s is located in one of Amarillo’s original greenhouses, built on South Washington in the early 1940s and run by the Howard family. The Howards closed the place around 2010 and it changed hands a few times until it ultimately sat dilapidated. Nettie and James bought the place in 2021.
“It was bad,” Trimble says. “All the ceilings were busted out, full of weeds.”
According to James, they passed on the building twice, but reconsidered after evaluating the land costs to build their own greenhouse. “Everything you see in here, we’ve literally had our hands on,” James says. “If you can look at it, I’ve either repaired it, replaced it, or renovated it in some way, shape or form.”
The original greenhouse was completely rotted out, and one corner had been crushed when a truck backed into it. It needed new gas lines, water lines and heaters. Trimble got a contractor’s license from the City of Amarillo and got bonded so they could legally tear down the old greenhouse themselves. With YouTube tutorials to guide them, they re-textured half the interior surfaces, installed new baseboards, crown molding and doors. They ripped out all the ceiling insulation.
After three years of renovations, Nettie’s finally opened.
The duo’s love of plants and their willingness to get creative and literally roll up their sleeves is apparent in the layout of the shop. James learned how to make a koi pond, now situated in the back next to a full-size mermaid made completely of plants. A wall of tropicals leads the way there, with an assortment of plants rarely seen in any big box chain. A few aloe vera plants are so large they have blooms.
Nettie’s has gained a local reputation for their terrariums, a new trend in the plant world. They create their own for sale and sometimes offer classes for newcomers to the hobby.
Do they ever question this dream they’ve brought to life? “Every day,” James says with a laugh.
“I’m still questioning myself,” Trimble adds. “In the winter, you don’t make anything, you know, and last spring, nobody really knew we were open yet. So, buying inventory, thinking what people want versus what they actually bought was very tricky.”
But it’s clear the plant community is growing in Amarillo. Every week, they meet people buying their first plants. Some have greenhouses themselves—and still have questions.
“I’ll help you the best I can,” Trimble says. “And it’s so cool to see the old generation—the ladies that are in their late 80s, early 90s, that come in here and say, ‘I shopped here as a girl with my parents. We grew up coming to this place.’ And they thank us for saving it.”
When the holidays roll around, customers tell them they remember the poinsettias from the original greenhouse, which came wrapped in golden foil. In fact, the original owners have stopped by to meet the new mother-and-son team bringing the place back to life.
“There’s a guy that came in with his mom and his mom’s name was in here. His grandma’s name is in the concrete,” James says, pointing out names and initials etched into the foundation 60 years ago. “Our names are in there, and then underneath this big fern she scribbled ‘Nettie’s’ into the concrete. So, our names will be here forever.”
Plant Babies
Julie Fullington spent six months retired from the plant shop life. She missed it too much and had to come back. “It’s just interacting with the people and, you know, they tell you about their plants and you compare stuff and they buy from you,” Fullington says. “You see them all the time. They’re like family.”
The former owner of Windswept Prairie Plants, Fullington created Amarillo’s first “plant truck” a few years back, but her career began years ago in Dalhart. She and her husband developed three greenhouses from which she sold outdoor plants. When the couple moved to Amarillo, she found employment, but missed the freedom of her previous career.
“You have so many limitations as opposed to working for yourself, so I started the plant truck,” Fullington says.
With the plant truck, she was able to set up a small greenhouse in Bushland and meet customers through pop-ups. The truck’s limited space also limited her interactions with customers. That’s when she leased a building on Sixth Avenue and moved everything from Bushland to create Windswept Prairie Plants.
After four years, she decided it was time to retire. “Well, I retired for six months and then—oh, I just missed it so much. I missed the plant community,” she says.
Enter Plant Babies, her new location closer to home in City View. With her husband’s help, Fullington painted the building, installed new shelving and built a wall to hide the bathroom.
“He does all the technical stuff,” Fullington says of her husband, Kerry. “My labels and inventory control. He cut out the Plant Baby sign on a CNC router and I painted it.”
Fullington says rare plants were just becoming popular right after Covid. At that point, they weren’t tissue-cultured—a cloning process used in mass production of plants—and were “actual rare plants.” Her new shop features tropical plants, including many “rare” varieties. She has small carnivorous plants that eat bloodworms and fish food, and imported and specialty plants like variegated peace lilies. She offers air plants that include “jellyfish” made from Tillandsia shells, succulents, cacti and a wall of orchids, which she tries to always keep in stock.
“Everybody’s got access to a lot of this stuff, but sometimes it’s nice to come into a shop and really to be able to look at it,” Fullington says. “You know, there’s a lot of people that are just starting their plant journey and they need help. What kind of soil does this plant take? How do you care for it? What kind of light?”
These conditions make a difference in choosing a plant, she adds. Some plants are picky. Some need to be watered with filtered water so their leaves won’t turn brown. “And trust me,” she says, some plants come with a steep learning curve. “I have trial-and-error, still.”
She offers custom potting for those who aren’t sure how to transplant. Fullington is a veteran of the local plant swap page on Facebook and has even met people—often former customers—in parking lots to exchange plants. She says the Amarillo plant community is diverse. “There’s a lot of people that love the out-of-the-ordinary, unusual plants,” she says. And they’re all ages. “I have a girl that came to the previous store and bought a plant. She sends me texts every couple months to let me know how her plant is doing.”
Fullington laments that the plants in the big box stores are sometimes so sad. Nobody’s caring for them, she says. Nobody’s playing music for them. Sometimes they’re cold. That’s the kind of care she hopes to give them at Plant Babies. Though not a greenhouse, it’s a shop dedicated to house plants and the people who love them.
Fullington is one of those people, and she thinks she might be addicted. “I feel a great sense of calm. It’s intense, like on plant shipment day when you get all these plants in, but it’s so rewarding,” she says. “I really love it, and truthfully, I can’t think of anything else I want to do, especially at this point in my life.”
Yellow Rose Plants
“We’re kind of like the dive bar of greenhouses,” Tanner Irwin says. Nearby, a Yellow Rose Plants employee leans around the corner. “No! Don’t say that!”
Irwin grins. “You don’t like that. My wife doesn’t really like it either. But we really try to have some good prices and good plants,” he says. “I really try to be a plant store more than a boutique. I don’t sell a whole lot of pesticides or anything like that. I just try to focus on plants.”
Irwin’s family has been in the wholesale greenhouse business since the 1960s. His grandfather came to the area from Guthrie, Oklahoma, and started Irwin Greenhouse in Canyon. His father and two aunts were also in the business, and his father launched his own greenhouse operation in the late 1970s on Osage Street. Ten years ago, Irwin started working there, learning wholesale, growing and business operations.
“I’ve kind of always wanted to have a retail spot,” he says. The previous business at this location, Jeff’s Greenhouse, was a customer. “For a couple of years I was chatting them up saying I’d love to buy this place.” In 2023, it finally happened.
He says he wanted to follow in his family’s footsteps because he enjoys growing and seeing people “getting a nice, good plant.” Having gathered a host of connections with suppliers, he’s in a position to pay close attention to pricing.
“Almost all of my prices are lower than the big box stores,” Irwin says. “I know what everybody’s charging for everything. I try to have a good, consistent plant at a consistent price. We run specials all the time, but without specials, without discounts, we try to have a solid, good place to get local plants.”
Getting the facility operational was a challenge. That first spring was a mess, he says, as they balanced retail sales while doing repairs and watching weeds growing through the tables.
“It’s a very seasonal business, especially the way we operate, so April/May is an absolute mad house. Probably 75 to 80 percent of our money we make in two or three months, so budgeting was important. Still is,” Irwin says. “But Amarillo has been great. I think we’re growing slowly. People are learning about us.”
Irwin’s approach to plants is straightforward: He focuses on plants that will do well in the Amarillo area, and while he hasn’t offered a large selection of indoor house plants in the past, he recognizes those get a lot of attention.
“Some of them are a little more finicky, a little more demanding, coming from mass production,” Irwin says. “I’m having to learn to give every plant as much care as we can individually, even though it’s hard sometimes.”
He’s interested to see plant trends coming back around from their heyday in the 1970s. “All the stories growing up, being in the greenhouse business of the ’70s, we call it foliage tropicals,” Irwin says. “And now this is kind of like the millennial generation really jumping on. It’s definitely growing.”
Irwin grows a lot of his house plants from plugs—young plants grown in individual cells, with leaves and developed root systems. While many will grow into full house plants, Irwin also sells these starters, pricing everything by pot size.
“We sell starter plugs for $2.99. It wasn’t something I intended to do, but when I opened and we have our trays out, people are like, ‘How much are those?’” Irwin says. “So plant people that are wanting to get out a little cheaper really like to do that. You can buy your starter plug, plant it up and kind of go from there.”
Like Yellow Rose Plants, starting small leaves plenty of room to flourish.
Windswept Prairie Plants
Windswept Prairie Plants used to be Petra Kommavongsa’s favorite plant store. “I would come in and just kind of browse around and would always be like, ‘Hey, if you ever want to sell, let me know. I’d be interested,’” she says.
And then owner Julie Fullington was ready to sell. Petra has continued offering re-pots, like the former owner. She points at a tricky work-in-progress that will take some thought to keep the root system intact. “But that’s what I love to do. That’s the fun part.”
A 24-year employee of Amarillo National Bank, Petra recently resigned to work at the shop full time. She points to plants as a positive source for her attention. Instead of doom-scrolling on her phone, she would research different plants and the types of soils they needed. She learned to make her own essential oils and bug sprays. Her plant knowledge is self-taught.
“I’m one of those hippie people. I just think this is what the Lord was calling me to do and I feel that complete joy from there,” she says. Alongside Windswept Prairies’ plant truck, repotting services and plant rehab, the business now offers 3D-printed plant products, including humidity trays and stackable moss poles with built-in water reservoirs. Her husband and kids are passionate about 3D printing, and assist with production. “It’s become a whole business, and so we’re just actually getting to live out our dream.”
