Blue House Florals’ Kali Rabaut on the May 8, 2025 cover of Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. Credit: Photo by Dave Decker. Design by David Loyola

It’s hard not to stop at the house sitting there on one of the many corners in Tampa Heights. Its Flemish blue color complements the sky, but most stunning is the landscape.

Juxtaposed to surrounding mowed lawns, Kali Rabaut’s roughly 3,000-square-foot lot is a patch of wild Florida dropped into one of the city’s fastest-growing neighborhoods. There are trees and shrubs: coral, honeysuckle, sweet almond, necklace pod, even baby longan, sugar apple, mango, mulberry, and loquat. Dill, cilantro, and kale grow nearby.

And then there are the rows and rows of flowers; not the kind grown in pursuit of the aged-out, unsustainable, ideal of English roses or hydrangeas, but cut varieties mixed in with natives of the Sunshine State—all sprouting from compost cultivated by Rabaut and her family.

The stems have names: zinnia, blanket flower, marigold, snapdragon, dinner plate dahlia, straw flower, amaranth, celosia, bee balm, sunflower, camellia, larkspur, and cosmos. The front lawn is even starting to grow a coat of sunshine mimosa, with boisterous lavender spheres for flowers begging not to be stepped on.

All of them buzz with bees and bloom in colors—violet, yellow, gold, lace white, vermillion, scarlet, ice pink, and more—all popping against the home and begging for passersby to slow down.

Photos: All the stems we saw at Tampa’s Blue House Florals

And if you stop and listen, the plants also have something to say about us.

“The garden is a good indicator for how I’m feeling,” Rabaut, 38, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.

Her designs—which can include 10-50 ingredients—end up in the hands of Blue House Florals‘ subscribers and for folks on the other end of one-off deliveries. They also co-star at weddings alongside plants she sometimes has to buy from local farmers to supplement the demands of the party. Earlier this year, Rabaut used her flowers for art shows at St. Petersburg’s Museum of Fine Arts and Hotel Haya in Ybor City. Gardening, and the artistic process of floristry, is healing, but can sometimes feel like work.

“Sometimes I’m taking inventory, and I’m seeing them as products, instead of as living beings,” Rabaut said. “When I notice that, I know that I am not in the right
place for me.”

On better days, the flowers teach Rabaut about the world at large. Diversity is among those lessons, and essential to her business since the garden is at the mercy of the seasons. “We don’t know if it’s gonna be dry or if it’s gonna be super wet, or if we’re gonna have a freeze, and so there’s a lot of variety, which will inform my designs,” she said.

The garden is also home to plants that pair well together like tomato and marigold. Companion plants often give each other nutrients they don’t get on their own, and mitigate the need for the organic bacterial pesticides Rabaut uses on occasion during the warm months.

Volunteers—that is flowers that grow on their own—pop up and thrive in random places on the property. For the most part, she lets them do their thing.

“The plants rely on each other,” Rabaut added. “We need everybody to show up.”

The garden also makes suggestions about life and death—specifically, when those things start. Is the flower on life support after Rabaut cuts it and puts it in a vase? Does its life start when it arrives at someone’s home? There was once a cherry laurel in one corner of the lot, but her family removed it to grow other things. It just kept sprouting for a year.

“At what point did that tree die,” she asked. “That’s an interesting thing that the garden tries to teach us.”

It was death, too, that pushed Rabaut to start Blue House Florals.

Blue House Florals designs can include 10-50 ingredients, including snapdragon. Credit: Photo by Dave Decker

Besides her other pursuits (acting, singing), Rabaut’s Suncoast Compost used to help companies and families deal with food waste. One evening, as her family was shoveling compost at A Simpler Place in Riverview, Rabaut caught a view of the farm’s cut flower patch. She asked questions, planted zinnias (“the gateway drug to cut flowers”), connected with florists like Orlando’s FarmGal Flowers, and thought that it might be nice to retire and become a farmer-florist.

Then came covid, and in the same year, Rabaut lost her brother Micah to cancer. “I just kind of realized that you don’t always get a chance to retire,” she said. So her family sold the composting business. She is better for it.

Like others, Rabaut has anxiety about death, but the garden has made her less afraid. “You just see how life feeds into death and death feeds into life,” she recently told WMNF public affairs program The Skinny.

The best part, she told CL, is the regular connection with people that happens when Rabaut goes out into the community, or welcomes clients to the blue house, to teach and learn about gardening. Even large weddings that disconnect her from the garden have a way of cultivating togetherness. “People want to be a part of something beautiful,” she said.

Lately, all of that has Rabaut thinking about abundance. Pointing to a flower in the garden, she noted that the single bud can have more than a hundred seeds. And that’s more than enough to start growing more.

Enoughness, to Rabaut, is an idea, but not one you can point to or wrap your hands around. It’s more of an orientation than a destination. “You don’t arrive there. You walk through it and sit with it, even as it slips through your hands,” she explained.

As Rabaut grows her business, she strives to stay rooted to her garden and grow without compromising her health, relationships, and joy.

That concept, of enough, extends to everyone who receives a bouquet of flowers, too.

“Even if I made a bouquet with all the flowers in the whole garden, it wouldn’t be enough to express how much you are loved,” Rabaut said. “But it’s a start.”

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This article appears in May 1-7, 2025.