Rebecca Green didn’t set out to become a flower grower. She and her husband Joel first arrived in DC as law students, expecting perhaps a temporary stay. But years passed, careers took shape, and the city, through moves from Logan Circle to Columbia Heights to 16th Street Heights, became home. Along the way came two children, Kane and Cami, and a life that balanced demanding legal work for Rebecca with a growing inclination toward something more creative and outdoors.

Rebecca’s launch this year of a flower venture here in Spring Valley has been anything but linear. The family’s gardening started small as moved neighborhoods: pots on a roof deck, then a modest garden near Rock Creek Park. “The kids would help me,” she recalls. “It was always something we did together.” It wasn’t until the family settled in Spring Valley, on a large corner lot at Fordham and Quebec, that the idea of a flower business formed.

It started as a plan for hedges and soon turned into something more ambitious. “I thought, ‘let me just try flowers,’” she says.  A small bed visible from her daughter’s window led to a larger effort, and last fall the two of them planted tulips together. How many? “A few thousand,” Rebecca says.

Her interest in the outdoors started early. With two parents in science, she was the outlier in choosing law, though she never fully left that early interest behind. “I got undergrad degrees in ecology and biology knowing that I wanted to do environmental law,” she says, a plan that brought her to George Washington University and into law firm work after graduation.

Rebecca practiced law through the early years of raising her children, but the pace of two demanding legal careers proved difficult to balance at home. (Her husband Joel is a partner at WilmerHale.) She eventually took leave, started a blog called Not-So-Stay At Home Mom, which grew into freelance content and photography work, and later into a book published in 2016, Banish Boredom: Activities to Do with Kids That You’ll Actually Enjoy. It’s still available on Amazon.

Her work evolved as her children got older. “They weren’t the ones doing the activities [in the book] as much with me anymore,” she says. She returned briefly to legal work in a practice management role, but the shift to Spring Valley marked another turning point. With more space and time at home, her focus moved outward again. This time into the garden.

It’s there that her environmental perspective carries through in her approach to the soil and planting. She focuses on soil health, composting, and sustainable growing practices, working to transform DC’s compacted clay into something fertile and alive. Marigolds are planted to break up the soil; cover crops help restore nutrients. The garden is also a certified monarch waystation, complete with milkweed and native bee habitats. Neighbors, especially kids, occasionally stop by to look at what’s growing or ask questions. She’s open to those conversations and often trades tips with other gardeners.

This spring marks the first season of the new business. Her daughter's favorite flower, tulips, came first, followed by summer flowers like zinnias, cosmos, sunflowers, dahlias, strawflowers, and amaranth. For now, the plan is straightforward: offer cut flowers to neighbors through social media at @wilddistrictbloomco with pickup from her home. She’s also beginning to connect with local florists and experiment with collaborations, including a tulip vase exchange project with a local ceramics group.

She’s approaching the project in a measured way. “I’m taking it one step at a time,” Rebecca says. Longer term, she’d like to establish pickups at local shops, supply flowers in bulk to DC area florists, and possibly set up a small neighborhood stand or participate in a farmers’ market. She’s not interested in event work like weddings, preferring to focus on growing.

For her, keeping the business local is part of the point. She’s not planning to ship flowers or scale it beyond what she can manage on-site, but to offer something fresher, more fragrant, and more distinctive than what typically travels thousands of miles to reach a bouquet.