Moving indoors as winter weather approaches doesn't mean you have to give up being surrounded by the warm plant life that helps make summertime so pleasurable, Karen L. Goldberg submits. Rather, it might just mean that you need some help in picking an array of soothing indoor plants that won't shrivel up immediately after you get them home due to your lack of a green thumb, she says.

Goldberg's specialty is providing such guidance. She owns The Plant Wizard, a quaint three-year-old shop at 3103 S. Grand Blvd. that sells all types of indoor plants, as well as baskets, pots, plant stands, and gift and dcor items. She also treats it, though, as a consulting enterprise.

She works through a wholesale greenhouse in California to offer what she contends is a broader and healthier selection of indoor plants than is available from most other retailers here.

Perhaps more significantly, she says she seeks to make sure—through an interactive process—that her customers leave with plants that best suit their particular home or office environments and maintenance skill levels.

"It's not that people don't want plants," but rather that they often lack confidence in their ability to keep plants flourishing, Goldberg says. "I say, 'Garden inside.' I work very closely with them. I try to give them lots of options."

In certain cases, she says, she even goes to people's homes to evaluate areas where plants are desired and to help them select the right ones.

She did that recently for a Post Falls couple, for example, helping them pick a couple of 11-foot Dracaenas that they placed on each side of an entryway at the base of a staircase in their upscale abode.

"I'm here for the greater good of plants," she says, extolling their oxygen-replenishing environmental benefits in addition to their aesthetic value.

The Plant Wizard occupies a funky, old 1,000-square-foot converted gas station that most recently had housed the Urban Canine & Dog Spaw.

Goldberg says she repainted the building's interior, installed shelving, then began filling the space with greenery.

The hundreds of plants that now make up the bulk of her inventory occupy most of the building's floor space, including much of what originally had been the gas station's attached office area. A circular path in the main portion of the building provides just enough room for customers to meander through the shop and peruse its lush offerings before ending up back at a retail counter near the main entrance. The sheer number of plants of all sizes, combined with the copious amounts of natural light streaming through the windows of the former service bay's big roll-up door, lend the shop an almost tropical feel.

Prices there during one recent visit ranged from between $4 and $8 for four-inch pathos vine and prayer plants to $385 for an eight-foot Kentia palm. A majority of the plants—including various types of brightly colored orchids—appeared to be in the $16-to-$30 range.

Goldberg says she operates the business by herself, except for occasional help from a son, and had been "right on target" with her revenue goals until the last couple of months, when the economic downturn caused sales to fall off sharply. She says she's hoping that as people travel less and spend more time at home, some of their spending will be funneled to improving their living spaces, including by buying more plants, which might help sales at her shop to rebound.

She says she's "spoken at every garden club in town," but one of her biggest challenges continues to be "getting people to know I'm here."

Goldberg appears well qualified to help people make decisions about plants, having worked in that industry for 32 years and operating her own business for all but two of those years.

"I've always had a love of plants," she says. "This has always been my total passion."

Growing up in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles, she started working for an indoor-plant shop in 1976, at age 16, and founded her own interior "plantscape" business, also called The Plant Wizard, there in Reseda, Calif., two years later. Such businesses help design where and what types of plants will be used in clients' homes and businesses, then provide the plants and maintain them.

While getting her own business rolling, she says, she also spent a year working for a wholesale grower, selling plants out of the back of a route truck to florists, grocery stores, and plant shops.

Her plantscape enterprise blossomed over the years, she says, to where she and four employees were maintaining plants at the homes of such luminaries as actor Bill Bixby, TV game show host Pat Sajak, singer Jack Jones, and "American Idol" TV show producer Nygel Lythgoe, as well as at several prominent country clubs and Polygram Records, among other businesses.

"It was a good business, but it was killing me," Goldberg says. By the time she was 44, she says, "I just had kind of hit the wall. I didn't want to continue doing that for another 27 years. It had taken its toll."

Her brother, Keith Beebe, who chairs the theology and philosophy department at Whitworth University, encouraged her to consider relocating to Spokane, and during a July 2004 visit here, she decided to do just that. Divorced and with two children who had reached adulthood, she says she realized nothing was holding her back. She returned to Spokane over the 2004 Halloween weekend to buy a home, then moved here in December of that year.

She continued to operate the Southern California business for six months, mostly on a remote basis, then sold it to friends in the plant industry shortly before she started the shop by the same name in July 2005. She says she continues to work with the same California wholesale greenhouse that was her chief supplier when she owned the business there, but had to work out transportation logistics that would assure the plants would arrive here quickly and in good shape.

She no longer maintains plants for customers, but says she special orders them, accepts orders over the phone, and offers free gift wrap and free delivery, all in the interest of promoting word-of-mouth sales and stirring greater public appreciation for the types of plants she stocks.

Although the economic downturn has caused her sales to wilt a bit, she says she still has high hopes that the shop eventually will flourish.

"I've always felt it would fly because there's not a lot of this going on here," she says, adding, "I'm in it for the long haul. My long-term goal is definitely to continue to promote this business and to continue to grow it."