Long before plant shops became a design trend, Planted Earth was already blending greenery with the unexpected. Dan and Penny Doty opened the business in the summer of 1971 after moving from Los Angeles to Utah, building a store around a simple but at-the-time unusual idea: pairing plants with artistic goods like hand-thrown pottery, macrame, and handmade jewelry. For its first twelve years the business operated out of a half-acre greenhouse on six and a half acres of land before the Dotys took on a much bigger project in 1978, purchasing the historic Cordner home on State Street in Orem, a Victorian house dating to 1898 that had been condemned at the time. Dan, his father Sam, and Joseph Germaine spent years fully renovating the century-old building, and that restored home has served as the store’s location ever since.
Today Planted Earth operates from that same address, 440 S State Street in Orem, as a genuinely eclectic mix of a nursery and an antique shop under one roof. Shoppers can find succulents, cacti, terrariums, and houseplants alongside estate and designer jewelry, Native American jewelry, antique furniture, chandeliers, vintage purses and linens, rare books, and rotating holiday decor. A dedicated vintage bead section, run under the shop’s own QueenBead branding, has become a specialty in its own right for customers hunting for beads and jewelry-making supplies not easily found elsewhere in Utah County. The shop is open Monday through Saturday, generally from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and closed Sunday, and its location in a historic residential-scale building rather than a strip mall gives the whole shopping experience a different feel from a typical big-box garden center or antique mall.
The Doty family’s floral department was part of the business for four decades before closing due to health concerns, a change that shifted the shop’s focus more fully toward plants and antiques while keeping its roots in the original 1971 concept. That combination, plants and antiques together, has become the store’s calling card and its point of difference in a market where most competitors specialize in one or the other. Because inventory spans so many categories, from succulents to sterling jewelry to full pieces of antique furniture, regular customers tend to treat a visit less like a single-purpose errand and more like a chance to browse several different kinds of stores at once.
One local story that has followed the building through the decades involves Edna, said to be the spirit of William Cordner’s wife, whom staff describe as an apparition that visits from time to time in the old house. Whether or not a visitor believes in that piece of local lore, it adds a layer of history to a building that has now stood in Orem’s city center for well over a century and has housed this particular plant-and-antique business for more than fifty of those years. Planted Earth is a plant nursery and antique shop housed in Orem’s historic 1898 Cordner home at 440 S State Street, offering everything from succulents and terrariums to estate jewelry and antique furniture since the business was founded by Dan and Penny Doty in 1971.
