By Natalie Emanuele

As a co-founder of Beautify Petaluma, what inspired you to create the nonprofit?

The inspiration to create the nonprofit was to make Petaluma prettier, and if we could all do our little piece, it makes everything worthwhile. Originally it was some girlfriends and me. We've lived here for a long time, and we felt like Petaluma could use some hanging flower baskets and just a little sprucing up. The city is busy with keeping us all safe and things of that nature, [so] we felt like we needed to help, and we started with the flower baskets. 

We just come up with different ideas, like, “Hey, what about this as an abandoned flower bed? Maybe we should plant some flowers in it.” Then we partnered with the Petaluma Yacht Club along the trestle to plant flowers in this flower bed. It was a succulent garden. It's beautiful. 

Could you tell us a little about the people involved with Beautify Petaluma?

Like I said, six ladies come together for the greater good of making Petaluma prettier. We're all volunteers. We meet twice a week for our board meetings in a work session, and then when we have a project we reach out through our website for volunteers to help. The Petaluma Garden Club has been wonderful, helping us plant the flowers in the flower baskets, or we consult them on what type of flowers. 

For our succulent garden along the river, we also consulted the garden club. We've reached out to Sloat Garden Center and they have donated all the flowers for the flower baskets. So the community has really supported this whole project. We could not do it without donations, and 100% of what we do is through donations.

After the flowers, what's next?

So, you know that we have those egg-shaped planters downtown along Kentucky Street and Washington Street, and they're cement, and they've been there for years, and they just look dingy and dirty. We are in the process of painting them a black satin, and we have partnered with the Active 2030 Club, and they're going to be painting with us in September. We're going to be reaching out to the merchants who have a pot in front of their storefront, just making sure that they're okay with us painting in black. But black will be nice and contemporary and clean, and it'll be a beautiful aesthetic for the city. And it will match; the light posts are all black, the garbage cans are all black. It'll just be a cohesive look: an upscale look.

Any other projects on your wish list?

We have some ideas of installing picnic benches so people can enjoy the river and stay and have a cup of coffee. Actually, right now there are no public picnic benches or bistro tables along the river that are not part of a restaurant, at least not that I've seen. So we'd like to add that. That would be one of the projects that we have been talking about. We haven't finalized it yet. 

We'd like to plant flowers along the riverbank where River Plaza shopping center is. We had one suggestion from a listener; he suggested hanging flower baskets from the train station coming into town, kind of like a corridor. I know there's a lot of blight along there, but maybe we could do something so that they won't look at the blight and it just kind of brings them into town. And again, some bistro tables, more benches. There's so many ideas.

What is something that people who know you through Beautify Petaluma don’t know about you?

We were raising our kids in Colorado, and I'm from here, so I wanted to move back. But my kids played lacrosse, and so I looked at the map and I said, “Well, we could move to Novato, or we could move to Petaluma.” The only problem is Novato has lacrosse and Petaluma doesn't. So my husband and I started the Petaluma Youth Lacrosse league in 2005.

For me personally, I have always felt like if there's something in the town that you want, start it. Don't wait for someone else to start it because it might not ever happen. With lacrosse, it wasn't here, so it's like, I didn't want my kids driving back and forth to Novato to play lacrosse. They wanted to play with their friends in school, so we started the league. Same thing with Beautify Petaluma. If we feel like we need something, a change in town, we do it. You have to put in the work, but it's very rewarding.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. 

Natalie Emanuele is a contributor to Petaluma Voice and a journalism student at Santa Rosa Junior College. She can be reached at news@petalumavoice.org.