Plant Nite always starts with an oath.
Though the rules get fuzzy after a few drinks.
“I promise,’’ the crowd repeats before the event begins, “to relax and have fun, not to throw soil at my neighbor, not to say ‘I like hers better,’ to embrace getting a little dirty, and to believe I have a green thumb. . . .’’
Plant Nite? It’s an offshoot of Paint Nite. Paint Nite is both an event, or events, and the company which started them in March 2012. The Somerville startup has met with great success, first bringing painting classes to pubs and now introducing gardening into the mix.
Since September Plant Nite has expanded to 18 cities. Patrons pick out glass bowls, inside which go multicolored, hard-to-kill succulents. These lovers of arid climates store water and require little care. Containers of soil sit near fried food and cocktails. (Those are for the patrons, not the plants.) In a setting that’s like an elementary school science class — only with adult beverages — participants pay to play with dirt, decorate their micro-garden, and drink. At the end of the night, they walk out with a terrarium festooned with moss, sand, wish rocks, and the occasional dinosaur.
A popular choice that evening was the toy triceratops. It’s an herbivore, after all.
Paint Nite cofounders Dan Hermann and Sean McGrail had been looking for their next big idea. Their team experimented with knitting and mixology nights hosted at their Somerville headquarters. Neither of those activities brought people together like Plant Nite.
The social element is key.
Soil is sometimes thrown. Thumbs do not change color. In a Brighton bar called The Green Briar on a Friday evening, many of the Plant Nite participants had only a passing familiarity with raising plants. Beer gardens, rather than the horticultural kind, were more their style.
And there are those like Wanda Flores, whose last name in Spanish means “flowers.’’ A registered nurse at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center who arrived with a group of colleagues, Flores said she makes a point to talk to her plants daily. They stay healthy and don’t talk back. That’s how she likes it.
“You ask it ‘How’s your day?’?’’ said the 43-year-old from Dorchester.
“Or, ‘How are you?’?’’
The goal is to build Plant Nite by partnering with gardening instructors. Host establishments pay nothing but make a profit on the food and drink orders on off-nights, while the instructor receives a portion of the take, as does Paint Nite, the company. Social media such as Instagram give Plant Nite a push online, with people sharing images of themselves with their terrariums in bars with the hashtag #PlantNite. Followers on Twitter have begun to ask for advice afterward about how to care for their plants.
That night in Brighton, families and friends dug holes in soil to make room for their succulents, which looked like small flowers with fat, fleshy leaves. Brigid Grogan, 27, from Brighton, assisted by passing around stones and moss to decorate the terrariums. She’s an art teacher who also hosts Paint Nites. She loves it when people get creative.
“Mya [Wilke] is really great,’’ Grogan said while pointing at the instructor. “She will tell participants to think about their narrative or the story they want to tell with their terrariums. It’s really amazing what people do; the stories they make up are really hilarious, especially with the dinosaurs. There’s been the last day on Earth or some idyllic dinosaur utopia scenarios.’’
She noted a difference between Paint Nite and Plant Nite: People feel less stressed when gardening.
“I’m just really excited to get something I can keep and take care of,’’ said Lauren Savo, 26, of Waltham. At the same table, Liz Krill, 29, of Cambridge said she tried Paint Nite but admitted her painting looked more like a piece by Jackson Pollock than the assigned theme.
“It was so bad,’’ Krill said laughing, “that I had to recycle the canvas.’’
Bride-to-be Crystal Waters, 31, of West Roxbury, was on a research mission for her wedding. She was learning to make terrariums to replicate the process for her centerpieces. Her maid of honor, Becky Quinn, 28, of Roslindale, enjoyed a glass of red wine and tried to make Waters’s vision a reality. Waters said the experience was a familiar one. Already a gardener, she grows flowers and vegetables. At Flores’s table, the fledgling gardeners were struggling.
Their thumbs weren’t black, but they weren’t green either.
Syntia Guillaume, 31, of Randolph, grabbed a brand new succulent.
“I’m starting over,’’ she said. The others around the table laughed as they tried to “massage the roots’’ and fit their plants in the black soil properly. They were hoping to bring the terrariums to work to decorate the office with some greenery.
Withered leaves don’t mean a plant’s dead, the teacher announced. Flores smiled and reminded Guillaume of the time she left town for a few months.
“She killed my plants,’’ Flores said. “I came back and they looked so sad.’’
The root of the problem? She thinks the plants were starved for conversation — and maybe water.
Cristela Guerra can be reached at cristela.guerra@globe.com.
