This San Francisco institution dates back to a 1906 dairy farm in the Outer Richmond

When I arrive at Clement Nursery on a sunny June afternoon, proprietor Phillip Feemster is too distracted to look up at me.

His shoulders are hunched over the checkout counter as he pores over an assortment of freshly printed sheets of paper scattered across the surface, like a makeshift evidence board in a detective movie. 

His eyes light up when he notices my presence, and the stacked silver bracelets on his wrist clank together as he eagerly hands over one of the pages he’s been waiting to show me. It bears a tiny black-and-white photocopied image of a 1943 advertisement for the nursery in the George Washington High School annual.

“This,” Feemster says, pointing to the photograph, “is how I discovered how long this place has really been around.”

Also in the pile is an early blueprint of the historic site at 1921 Clement St., mapping out a milk depot as well as a water tank. But what I find most striking of all is a photo of the Richmond District surrounded by a vast swath of farmland and cattle. In the distance, I can barely make out what Feemster tells me is Golden Gate Park when it was just 10 years old. He traces two hills with his finger — Mount Sutro on the left and Strawberry Hill on the right — surrounded by sand dunes. Near the foreground, a windmill juts towards the sky. 

It’s hard to believe we’re standing in that very same place — and that many of the original structures are still here, too.

A view of Clement Nursery, or as it was known in the late 1800s, the Old Park Farm. That’s Golden Gate Park in the background, with Mount Sutro on the left and Strawberry Hill on the right.  

Courtesy of the Western Neighborhoods Project

Clement Nursery is the oldest establishment of its kind in San Francisco and has been around for more than 80 years. However, the site dates back even earlier to one of the Richmond District’s first dairy farms, which was referred to as “Old Park Farm” or “Richmond Dairy.” Beginning in 1880, Theophilis Paton tended to 33 cows at the intersection of 21st Avenue and Clement Street. At first, his farm was the sole structure in the neighborhood for more than a mile, according to Western Neighborhoods Project co-founder Woody LaBounty. The Point Lobos Toll Road — now Geary Boulevard — was the only street connecting Paton’s dairy to the rest of the city, allowing him to easily deliver the milk downtown.

Dairy farms soon became ubiquitous in the rural neighborhood, and by 1888, there were somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 cows grazing in the city. Notably, John Baker (the one who settled Baker Beach) ran his own dairy in the Outer Richmond called the Golden Gate Dairy, and Joseph Greeley opened the Laurel Grove Dairy on 20th Avenue and Point Lobos Road — just a block away from Paton’s farm, which was considered to be one of the neighborhood’s last. It eventually closed in February of 1909 as the area began to fill with housing and new development. 

Ruhland’s Richmond Dairy was one of many dairy farms operating in the neighborhood in the late 1800s, and was located near the intersection of Clement Avenue and 32nd Street. 

Courtesy of The Western Neighborhoods Project

But traces of the dairy are still visible at Clement Nursery today. Perhaps most prominently, there’s the turn-of-the-century farmhouse where the landlord’s daughter now resides, bordering the outdoor plant and vegetable plot. A former hay barn houses what is now the nursery storefront, with shelves of self-watering pots, houseplants, jewelry and other gifts on display. Out back, hundreds of native California plants bask in the sunlight next to what used to be the dairy’s cookhouse, which has since been renovated into an office, where Feemster’s desk is surrounded by dozens of lawn ornaments.

The checkout counter outside has a faded Beach Blanket Babylon logo on it — it used to be a souvenir cart for San Francisco’s longest-running musical revue (Feemster found it in the free section on Craigslist).

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE

Each week, he seems to uncover a new artifact or bit of trivia revealing another layer of the site’s history. The nursery allegedly served as Armistead Maupin’s inspiration for Plant Parenthood, the shop run by Michael “Mouse” Tolliver and Brian Hawkins in “Tales of the City,” though Feemster laments the fact that neither the 1993 PBS miniseries nor the 2019 HBO revival ever filmed there. 

“People trek to San Francisco from around the world to go to places that don’t really exist anymore,” he said. “Barbary Lane has some stairs, but they don’t lead to this beautiful, fantastic place Armistead Maupin built. But the nursery … it’s a part of our local culture. This is truly a flesh and blood place that is part of the series.”

Proprietor Phillip Feemster pauses to look at a grevillea.

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE

When Feemster took over as Clement Nursery’s seventh owner in 2012, all he wanted to do was reciprocate what the plants had already been providing for him. 

“When I got here, it was a pigsty. You wouldn’t believe it,” he says as he settles into a patio chair in the lush garden. Relaxing piano music emanates from an unseen speaker as Opal, the 3-year-old shop dog named for her birthstone, trots over and licks his hand before settling down at Feemster’s side.

Opal, the resident nursery dog. 

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE

He spent four months cleaning out the nursery, removing rotted wood and restoring the original structures of the dairy farm where he could. During the excavation process, he discovered a root cellar buried 4 feet beneath the cookhouse, where a family of raccoons had taken residence, and elsewhere in the former hay barn, an underground watering trough he thinks may have been used for cattle. 

Everything else was renovated using entirely salvaged materials. The roof of the greenhouse is covered in retro shower doors layered like shingles, and the blue glass windows on the adjacent building were repurposed from a 1980s-era Berkeley office tower that was never fully constructed. The checkout counter outside has a faded Beach Blanket Babylon logo on it — it used to be a souvenir cart for San Francisco’s longest-running musical revue (Feemster found it in the free section on Craigslist.) And overlooking the garden is a wooden treehouse he built for his own home near Dolores Park in 1998. He hopes to upgrade it with a slide someday for the children who visit the nursery each week. 

The roof of the greenhouse is covered in retro shower doors layered like shingles.

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE

Still, Feemster has watched neighborhood nurseries disappear from the Bay Area over the years, one by one. He estimates there are about a quarter of what there once were when he moved to San Francisco in 1995, and it makes his own nursery’s survival in the Richmond’s foggy climate that much more important to him. 

“I think the real reason people love this place is because it’s an anomaly,” he says. “To have buildings this old in San Francisco that have not been razed down. There’s nothing like it in the middle of the city.” 

This turn-of-the-century farmhouse is one of the original structures still standing at Clement Nursery. 

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE

But more importantly than that, he adds, “it’s the memories people have of this place from their childhood. … Some come here who have a connection to this place from 40 or 50 years ago. There’s a constant stream of people who came through when they were a kid, and there’s a profound happiness that it’s still here, and hasn’t morphed into something else.”

A man named Dennis, now a resident of the Castro, still comes by to visit the blooming wisteria he planted on the wall outside of the current office in 1964, when he was an employee at the nursery. And just last weekend, Brian Cederburg — the grandson of Maxine Taylor, who owned the nursery from the 1960s through the 1980s — stopped by to trade stories with Feemster about her time at the nursery. 

A photo of Clement Nursery in the 1980s.

Courtesy of Phillip Feemster/Clement Nursery

Feemster stops to lean toward a grevillea — a plant that more closely resembles a deep sea creature or even an alien than a flower, with needle-shaped petals forming a flamboyant bloom. He grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, where neither of his parents gardened, but he learned his love of the meditative craft from his grandmother. After spending more than 30 years working in advertising, he found his way back here.  

He touches the flower delicately and smiles. 

“Never in my life have I thought of this as a career. I did ask the universe to show me where to go, and I think it showed me this was what I needed to do,” he said. “I believe a person dies when their heart stops beating, and when the last person who remembers them passes away. This place is still alive because so many people remember it, and I want to keep it going.”

A view of the nursery today.

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE

At 80 years old, Clement Nursery in the Richmond is San Francisco’s oldest nursery.

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE

At 80 years old, Clement Nursery in the Richmond is San Francisco’s oldest nursery.

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE

At 80 years old, Clement Nursery in the Richmond is San Francisco’s oldest nursery.

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE

At 80 years old, Clement Nursery in the Richmond is San Francisco’s oldest nursery.

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE

At 80 years old, Clement Nursery in the Richmond is San Francisco’s oldest nursery.

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE

At 80 years old, Clement Nursery in the Richmond is San Francisco’s oldest nursery.

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE

At 80 years old, Clement Nursery in the Richmond is San Francisco’s oldest nursery.

Patricia Chang/Special to SFGATE