Roehampton Orchids began in Toronto couple Andrew Geimar and Felix To's condo in 2020, and their story quickly captured the internet's hearts. Since then, they've opened their own retail location and bloomed into a neighbourhood success story.

Geimar's passion for orchids began around 2017, when To bought him a moth orchid from Costco. That one orchid quickly became thousands, and soon they were sharing their plants and their knowledge with the whole city.

Roehampton Orchids was born out of the couple's home during the pandemic; at one point, they had between two and three thousand orchids in the condo. It didn't take long for them to realize they'd need a bigger space.

"The blogTO article actually really gave us a bit of a kick in the butt because we got so much demand and we were like, 'We can't be packing on our couch, on our beds for the next year,'" Geimar says. "And that was the pivoting point."

It took them until the end of 2021 to find a retail space, as To explains that not many people were willing to rent out their property during the pandemic.

Since opening the shop, they've partnered with local businesses for promotions and put on different workshops around orchid care. A big focus for next year, the couple say, is continuing that orchid education for anyone looking to dip their toes into that world.

Their Facebook group, Canadian Orchid Growers, has ballooned to around 12,000 members. Each month they hold an orchid photo contest, and the winning photo becomes the group's new banner.

"Now," says Geimar, "there's people from all over — east coast, west coast — posting their different climates, how they're growing, [and] giving advice."

The conversation and community that comes from the group excites the couple, and they want to continue some of their focus on the page to bring awareness to different kinds of orchids and how to care for them.

(That conversation is pretty frequent, too — when I checked, the page had 274 posts in the last month alone.)

The biggest challenge in running the store, Geimar says, is the eight hours on average it takes to water all the orchids.

There are also certain orchids they couldn't care for while operating out of their condo. The store has what Geimar likens to a wine fridge that stays at 25 degrees during the day and lowers to 10 degrees at night — for what he called the "high-altitude growers."

Geimar tells me that although people might expect orchids to be found in places like Hawaii, Canada actually has over 45 species of native orchids (Hawaii only has three).

Some of the couple's personal favourites in the store are the Phragmipedium besseae, the Fdk. Black Pearl and the Vanda Jake Justin Tkatchenko.

The Phragmipedium besseae.

Despite having the store, they're still growing even more in their condo. Geimar mentioned a large species of lady slipper called Phragmipedium kovachii he bloomed in October that was awarded 87 points by the American Orchid Society.

They also said they've had other stores in Canada reach out for info on some of their orchids that aren't readily available on the market. So To says another goal for 2024, besides continuing orchid education, is to help distribute those types of orchids throughout Canada.

"The industry itself tends to be a little bit dated in how they do things," Geimar says. "So we're really trying to push the social media (like with) TikTok tutorials — to just make people a little bit more self-sufficient."