Rooted Again: After Cancer, Fire, and Two Market Collapses, a Humboldt Couple Plants Something Beautiful

The morning Kendall Richard left her home for the last time, she had eight minutes.

She grabbed two dogs, two cats, and six boxes of whatever her hands could reach. She did not get the artwork off the walls. She did not get the children’s drawings. She got out.

Behind her, the wildfire that swept through Pleasants Valley in 2020 took the rest, including the iris farm she and her husband Mark had spent 14 years building from a backyard hobby into something people drove hours to see.

“Everything we owned on the planet burned up,” Mark said.

That was not the first time the Richards had lost everything.

It would not be the last.

Even before the irises, there were always plants.

Mark and Kendall were real estate agents in the Bay Area, but their 18-acre Solano County property was always something more than a yard. They grew vegetables. They experimented. They stopped at Daffodil Hill one afternoon and came home wanting flowers everywhere. They planted tulips, daffodils, and irises. The deer ate everything except the irises.

So they planted more irises. Hobby gardeners who sold real estate.

The 2008 financial crash ended their real estate income overnight. Drowning in debt, the Richards turned to their hobby looking to find some brightness in the bleakness of an economic collapse.

On their own plot of real estate, a few rows of irises became eight. Eight became a field. Neither of them planned it exactly. That was how it always seemed to go with the Richards, one plant at a time until suddenly they had a farm.

The irises, by then multiplying steadily, became the plan. By 2014 and 2015, they had survived financial ruin with flowers. Thousands of people were making weekend pilgrimages to walk through their fields of irises. Artists came to paint watercolors. Musicians played ukulele between the rows. People drove from hours away to see the magic the Richards had cultivated in Solano County.

“We kind of became known as the iris people,” Mark said.

Then in 2016, he was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Mark’s response was not conventional. He told his doctor he was going to move to the mountains, juice vegetables, raise chickens, meditate, and grow cannabis. His doctor was not pleased. “He told me I was wasting valuable time,” Mark said. “That I was going to come back sicker.”

Mark moved to the hills of Humboldt County where he had spent time as a kid. Kendall stayed south to run the iris farm. Within nine months, Mark said his bloodwork came back, in his doctor’s words, like that of a 25-year-old.

He stayed. He grew cannabis. He learned plants the way he had always learned plants, by watching them closely, reading what they needed, developing his own enzyme mixes, growing things that thrived. “Anybody doing cannabis, we know plants,” he said. “You can see what they need.”

For several years, it held.

Then disaster struck again.

The LNU Lightning Complex Fire ripped through Pleasants Valley in August 2020, sending Kendall fleeing from the family home and farm with only six totes of belonging. Behind her, the fire consumed everything they had built, the weed-choking woodchips became ground fuel that killed the iris rhizomes that had sustained their family for over a decade.

Three hundred and thirty-five structures burned in that valley. Their home. Their farm. A million dollars in uninsured flower stock.

They tried to buy into Sonoma County after the insurance settled. Prices had spiked so far beyond what they received that they couldn’t get back in. They stopped trying and Kendall joined Mark in Humboldt, counting on cannabis to carry them while they figured out what came next.

Then that market collapsed too.

The combination of state regulatory costs, dropping wholesale prices, and competition from the unregulated market had been squeezing Humboldt’s cannabis farmers for years. By 2024, the Richards folded the operation. For the fourth time in their lives together, they were starting over.

They planted a few rows of irises. Then a few more.

The field the Richards tend now sits in Redcrest, on a rented property where the morning fog holds in the trees and the light, when it breaks through, hits the blooms in a way that makes you stop walking. There are 3,000 to 4,000 flowers open right now, in colors that reframe what an iris can be: deep burgundy, near-black, pale coral, electric violet, a white one called Immortality that blooms three times a year and has been on Kendall’s Thanksgiving table every November she can remember.

Their operation, Pleasants Valley Iris Farm, kept the name of the valley that burned.

The work of rebuilding, yet again, is relentless and entirely by hand. Mark will not use chemical sprays, especially since the lymphoma. Every rhizome gets dug, trimmed, washed, and hand-labeled before it ships to customers across the country. What he learned tending cannabis, reading nitrogen deficiency in a leaf, building soil with organic matter, knowing when a plant is stressed before it shows it, he uses here too. The field will triple in size next year.

But the math is hard. Sales have been strong this spring, and still the costs of rebuilding and running a hand-tended, spray-free operation outpace what comes in. Shipping rates have climbed sharply. Labor costs have doubled from what they paid their own teenagers in the Solano County fields. “The prices haven’t gone up the way costs have,” Kendall said.

So they adapt. Again. They are planning to bring cut flowers and rhizomes to local farmers markets within the next few weeks, starting with lilies from 22,000 bulbs they acquired when a Eureka flower shop closed. They are finishing a video series, out this June, teaching people how to run a small iris operation from their backyard. Twenty years of hard-won knowledge, offered up so others don’t have to learn it through trial and error, the way they did.

Mark said he thinks about the cannabis farmers being forced out across Humboldt, people who know how to grow things, who built their lives around coaxing something out of the ground. “You know plants,” he said. “You need to grow something.”

For him and Kendall, that something has always been there, waiting in the ground, multiplying quietly while everything else fell apart.

Kendall said irises have a way of becoming generational, passed from grandparent to grandchild as the rhizomes divide and spread, living on longer than the people who planted them. Her customers often tell her this, that they’re making a memorial garden, that they inherited a few roots after someone died, that their grandmother loved irises.

“They pass them down,” she said, “because they just keep multiplying.”

It is not hard to hear something else in that, standing in a Redcrest field with a couple who have rebuilt from zero more times than most people face in a lifetime, watching the rows stretch out toward the tree line.

One rhizome becomes three. Three becomes nine. Nine becomes twenty-seven.

They know this. They are counting on it.

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Rhizomes are available to order now at irisfarmer.com for summer shipment. Farm visits in Redcrest are available by appointment. Follow Pleasance Valley Iris Farm on Facebook.

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