The Willow Glen Resident

Photograph by Skye Dunlap

Peaceful Place: Laura Augusta (left) envisions a garden behind L'Daisy Patch, complete with plants, benches and a waterfall. Wedding specialist Karen Nadler and corporate consultant Karen Fox will help shape the store.

New Daisy Patch owner finds purpose in flowers

By Cecily Barnes

After 23 years, Judie Block and Lynette Clark have sold the Daisy Patch, but new owner Laura Augusta will keep the store rooted in the same location, sell essentially the same merchandise and keep the same name--with one minor difference.

Instead of The Daisy Patch, the store is now called L'Daisy Patch. Augusta nearly explodes with giddiness when talking about her new acquisition.

"I plan on living and dying here," she says fervently, sitting on a stool in the back room of her merchandise-packed new store. "It's my dream. It brings tears to my eyes."

Augusta entered the field of gifts and flowers shortly after her 40th birthday. Before that, she had spent her adult career in property management and, before that, banking.

"On my 40th birthday I got a card that said, 'To a woman who knows where she's going and what she's doing.' And I broke into tears, because I didn't know!"

Two weeks later, Augusta enrolled in a floral-design class, followed by a course to earn her certificate in the field. After three years selling silk floral arrangements to hotels out of her garage, Augusta leased a small storefront on the north end of Lincoln Avenue.

But business was slow on that end of The Avenue, and the shop never completely took off, she says. Then Augusta read that Block and Clark were seeking a new owner for the Daisy Patch. "I called them up and said, 'It's me, it's me you're looking for,' " Augusta says. "We set up a meeting, and things just went from there."

Now that the sale is final, Augusta is the picture of enthusiasm. Besides repainting, recarpeting and redesigning the entire place, she plans to offer floral-design classes in the store's garage and build a garden behind the store. The garden, or L'Jardin, will provide a peaceful setting for people to hang out, complete with plants, flowers, benches, a waterfall and free coffee and tea.

"It will be a place for mothers with strollers to kick up their feet, or for men to relax while their wives or girlfriends shop," Augusta says, speaking faster and faster. "We'll supply the Wall Street Journal and magazines so that people can read. There will be a soda machine for children. And I'm going to plant wild English daisies, because it's L'Daisy Patch."

Previous owners Block and Clark say it's a relief to have left the store in such competent and enthusiastic hands.

"We're very happy that someone will continue on with the tradition," Block says. "In fact, when she came into the Daisy Patch, she said there wasn't anything in there that she wouldn't have bought herself, and when Lynette and I went into her store, we felt the same."

Nonetheless, Block and Clark admit it's difficult to simply up and leave what took them 23 years to build. Mostly, Block says, she'll miss all the wonderful people.

"Say goodbye for me," she says earnestly.

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