About Us

  • Jumanji Oliana

    Jumanji has been gardening professionally since 2008 when she opened her first garden design business in Seattle WA with two close friends and fellow plant nerds. In 2017 she moved back to her home town on Whidbey Island and expanded her business to include a native plant nursery in which she propagates much of her inventory.

    Jumanji's education includes an undergraduate degree in Environmental Science from the Evergreen State College. She also attended the horticulture department at the Edmonds Community College and completed the Wetland Science and Management program at the University of WA. Her knowledge of native plants stems from attending the Washington Native Plant Society's Native Plant Stewardship Program and her own passion for learning as much as she can about plants in this region. Jumanji often teams up with local contractors and gardeners to complete large scale projects.

  • Megan Thistle

    Megan was born and raised in the PNW but her work has taken her across the country. Her jobs have spanned a variety of fields including (but not limited to) gardening, farming, community health programming, political organizing, and forest firefighting. The thread connecting her interests and aspirations is community movement towards equity, joy, and rich biodiversity. Bastyr University’s Holistic Landscape Design program (class of 2020) drew her back to her home state of Washington, where a passion for regenerative land practices has taken root.

    Megan’s work with Rainy Day Flora began as an internship while she finished her program at Bastyr University, and has grown to the point that she became a partner in the business at the beginning of 2024.

We Believe in Ethical Gardening Practices

   Our vision is to create and maintain gardens that connect people with nature. We believe that part of our responsibility is to help educate our clients and the public about sustainable gardening practices.

   We live in a very unique and lush region with many species of conifers, deciduous trees and understory shrubs, which help clean our water, air and provide ideal habitat for native wildlife. Unfortunately, those same qualities afford excellent conditions for invasive weeds to flourish. Most invasive weeds started as garden favorites brought over from Europe or China, but with no native plants or animals to keep them under control, they have spread and have now become destructive, replacing essential habitat and in some cases they have become a danger to our health.

   For this reason, in order to preserve remaining green spaces, we try to be conscious of the long-term effects of the gardens that we install and encourage the use of native NW plants and non-invasive, non-native plants.   

   There are numerous benefits for using native plants in your landscape. Native plants have had thousands of years to adapt to the Pacific Northwest’s growing conditions. As a result they are very versatile in their soil, sun, and water needs, they require very little maintenance, their water usage is typically low unless they are a bog plant, in which case they are great for rain gardens and they grow well in native soil.

   As well as being ideal for problem areas in your garden, native plants are typically more pest and disease resistant, and do not need fertilizers to grow. In addition, they provide a habitat for wildlife that depend on native plants for food and shelter, something vitally important that non-native or exotic plants may disrupt or even destroy.