Every August 26, the country marks Women's Equality Day — the anniversary of the day in 1920 when the 19th Amendment was certified and American women, at least on paper, secured the right to vote. I think about that date differently now than I did earlier in my life. When you've spent decades building something of your own, you start to see how much of what you get to do today rests on doors other people pried open long before you arrived.
For me, those doors happen to lead into a room full of plants. And the more I've learned about the women who came before me — in business, in science, and in the quiet world of gardening — the more I've realized my story isn't a solo act. It's a continuation.
The Women Who Came Before Us
The right to vote didn't arrive as a gift. It was the result of more than seventy years of organizing that most people trace back to the 1848 women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, where organizers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott first put equal rights into words. Generation after generation kept pushing after that — marching, lobbying, getting arrested, and refusing to go home.
It came down to a single vote. In August 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth and deciding state to ratify the amendment, and it passed by one legislator changing his mind — reportedly after his mother told him to do the right thing. Days later, the amendment was certified in Washington, and the law of the land changed.
I try to hold the whole truth of that moment, though. The 19th Amendment did not actually enfranchise every woman. Millions of women of color remained shut out for decades by poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright intimidation, and it took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — forty-five more years — before that promise came closer to reality for all women. When I say I'm grateful to the women who came before me, I mean all of them, including the ones history was slower to credit.
Women Have Always Belonged Among the Plants
Here's the piece of this history that hits closest to home for me. For a long stretch of Western history, women were pushed out of the sciences almost entirely — with one notable exception. Botany was considered a "respectable" pursuit for a woman, an acceptable hobby, and so plants became one of the few doorways women were allowed to walk through into real scientific work.
And walk through it they did. Jane Colden is remembered as the first female botanist in America, cataloging native plants in the 1700s. Women illustrated, collected, classified, and corresponded with the famous male botanists of their day — often doing the work while the men got the credit. Some turned that passion into enterprise: in 1886, a woman named C.H. Lippincott started a seed company in Minneapolis and called herself the "Pioneer Seedswoman of America," publishing the first seed catalog written specifically for women at a time when catalogs were nothing but plain text. Later came figures like Rachel Carson, whose writing reshaped how we think about the natural world, and Lady Bird Johnson, who turned a love of wildflowers into national policy.
I love that the very thing so many women were limited to — plants, gardens, the domestic green world — turned out to be a place where they quietly changed science, business, and the landscape itself. When I water a shelf of houseplants every morning, I feel like I'm standing in a very long line of women who found freedom in exactly this.
My Own Path — and Why It's Never Too Late
I didn't come to this business in a straight line. For more than thirty years, I built companies centered on serving others — much of that time in the beauty and wellness world — and every chapter taught me the same lesson: success isn't only about what you build, it's about the lives you touch while you build it.
When the season came where a lot of people would have retired, I took a leap instead. I turned a hobby I'd loved since I was a teenager into Verdant Lyfe, which I launched in 2020. Trading a comfortable "wind-down" for a brand-new business at that stage of life was terrifying and completely worth it. It remains one of the most rewarding decisions I've ever made.
This year, I was humbled to see Verdant Lyfe named the 2026 Gold Award winner for South Florida's Favorite Gardening Store/Nursery. I'm proud of that recognition — but if I'm honest, it's not the thing I'll remember most. What means more are the relationships we've built with our customers and the simple privilege of brightening someone's day, one plant at a time.
To the Woman Wondering If It's Too Late
If you're reading this and quietly wondering whether you should take the next step — start the business, change careers, chase the dream that feels a size too big — I want to say this as plainly as I can: believe in yourself. Your experience matters. Your voice matters. And your dreams don't come with an expiration date.
The women who came before us fought so that we could stand where we're standing. The best way I know to honor them is to keep going — and to reach back and pull someone else forward while we do it. This Women's Equality Day, let's keep lifting one another up, celebrating each other's wins, and building a future where every woman has the room to grow into everything she's capable of.
Thank you for growing alongside us. Here's to belonging exactly where our dreams take us — and to blooming, no matter what season we're in.
Happy Women's Equality Day. 🌿
