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Katie Peterson, left, and Alice Peterson got the idea to start a plant shop when they got “bitten by the houseplant bug” while quarantining during the pandemic.

The Petersons said they heard the store space in Battle Ground opened up about the same time they noticed there was one available beer-and-wine license left Tippecanoe County.

The Plant Pub’s main room is lined with chairs, couches and tables. A chalkboard along one wall displays the available alcoholic drinks.

Katie Peterson, left, and Alice Peterson got the idea to start a plant shop when they got “bitten by the houseplant bug” while quarantining during the pandemic.

Along the railroad tracks next to Prophetstown State Park, just off the beaten path, sits a one-room, vinyl-sided plant shop. This shop’s interior hosts a mix of sweet and earthy smells while homely couches sit below shelves filled with enough cacti and flowers to cover the entire length of the walls.

All except for the largest wall, which doubles as a chalkboard and lists available drinks and their prices.

Exactly as its name suggests, the Plant Pub is a beer-and-wine-licensed houseplant shop. Its grand opening is Saturday at 9 a.m., during which the Plant Pub will serve mimosas and hand out free succulents to its first 10 guests.

The two owners, Katie Peterson and her mom Alice Peterson, started renting the one-room building in downtown Battle Ground in November. The layout is cozy but not cramped and offers a variety of seating options, which range from a small couch to a couple of large tables and individual chairs.

The shop’s chalkboard displays a list of all beers and wines available for purchase. This list features the expected domestics, a couple Midwestern IPAs and Lafayette’s own People’s Brewing Company.

Katie said she and her mom specifically sought a distributor that carried People’s because they want to support local business — a prevalent theme throughout the Plant Pub.

Most of the shop’s plants are hung by macramés which, like many of the pots displayed on shelves, are also sourced by artists with local connections.

“Anytime we can find plant-centered products that local people make,” Katie shared, “we try to bring that in instead of wholesale items from generic places.”

The Plant Pub’s spin involves bringing in local people to lead “one-sitting” guided activities, such as building moss poles for climbing plants, painting/theming design boards, knotting macramés and yoga.

The Petersons said they heard the store space in Battle Ground opened up about the same time they noticed there was one available beer-and-wine license left Tippecanoe County.

Alice compared the “workshops” Katie mentioned to “Painting with a Twist,” a nationwide business that hosts guided painting clinics with wine and an added focus on socialization.

“We had been telling this wonderful lady at the farmers market about how we were trying to start scheduling workshops,” Katie said, “and she told us, ‘Well, I could teach yoga sometime.’ So a lot of the (events) have just (come out of) happenstance and serendipity.”

Katie said the inspiration to start something like the Plant Pub occurred when she was “bitten by the houseplant bug” in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which she and her mom, who had always been very into plants, quarantined together.

“She started getting me hooked,” Alice said. “We were both working from home, and we were getting stir crazy. (My mom’s) pointing out these plants that I had never given two cents worth of time, but it was such a beautiful thing to bring some life back into the house.”

When people started getting back out and socializing, Katie said the idea for a plant shop that could serve beer and wine kept resurfacing. Alice said they heard the storefront was available to rent by word-of-mouth.

“We looked at it all, and there was one beer-and-wine license available left in town,” Katie said, “and we just kind of decided, ‘you know what, this is clearly fate.’”

Getting the Plant Pub ready for business was a long process. Before the Petersons took over, the building, which had once been home to a Bedrock Liquors, lacked many features the health department required for anyone planning to serve licensed beverages.

They needed to redo plumbing as well as add windows, sinks, a door and loads of shelving for their plants. At the time, Katie was just starting graduate school in Indianapolis and Alice was still teaching for Head Start.

“It was a lot, so we were trying to chip away at it slowly,” Katie said. “My dad did a huge amount of work.”

Alice said he was “pretty handy” and was in large part responsible for getting the building up to health-code standards.

The Plant Pub will be open Wednesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., except when they close early for the Lafayette Farmer’s Market at 2 p.m. on Wednesdays. Aside from normal store operations, the pub also functions as an event space for small get-togethers.

The Plant Pub’s main room is lined with chairs, couches and tables. A chalkboard along one wall displays the available alcoholic drinks.

“We really wanted the houseplant shop, but we really wanted (to host) workshops where people can have a glass of wine or a beer and socialize,” Katie said. “It’s (a place) for people to have their book club, a game night or whatever they’d like.”

The community’s impact on the store extends to its furniture too. “A young man in the neighborhood” came by the shop and offered to make Adirondack furniture for their Beer Garden space behind the store, Alice said.

Jeremy Day, who Alice said “couldn’t be more wonderful,” dropped off the four handmade chairs and later a full-size solid-wood picnic table.

“This community is so supportive and so nice,” Alice said. “We liked the idea of collaborating with local businesses and the idea of having workshops and events that our community in Battle Ground, Purdue students and anyone wanting to do something surrounded by plants can get involved in.”

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