Longtime owners of Kalispell's Woodland Floral retiring

Woodland Floral, a mainstay of Kalispell’s bouquet and sentiment business, is changing hands after 45 years.

Since 1979, the densely packed shop specializing in flowers and gifts has been family-run out of the historic property at 647 Sixth Ave. E., and now they are ready, as owner Penny Kiger put it, “to pass the torch to a new, energetic generation.”  

The family will remain local and help orient the new owners leasing the shop space, although Kiger maintains, “I posted on Facebook I will never do flowers on Valentine's again.”

Running a busy flower shop is not easy work, Kiger said, although she added that visitors often wish aloud that they worked in such a peaceful place that gives so much joy to people. 

“Hand surgery, back problems, long hours… It’s hard on the body,” Kiger said. 

Painstaking craftsmanship though flowers don’t last forever. 

“We do everything here,” Kiger said. “When I train people they have to learn how to tie a bow. That may take a day, may take two to three days, but I make sure they can do it.”

Kiger says she honed her skills during a short stint with a Spokane wholesale florist, when she was cranking out 50 bouquets an hour. That was after a childhood spent observing the craft up close when her parents, Fay and Wes Wolf, owned the Woodland Floral shop.  

“Coming in at age 10, I’d watch the designers. I don’t remember being taught how to cut, how to make bows. I just did it,” Kiger recalls. 

She bought the shop in 2007 from her parents.

TIMES HAVE changed, the two matriarchs of Woodland Floral declared, especially in the last 15 years. 

“When we started, a dozen roses were $15, now they’re $140,” Kiger said, adding that gifts have become a large share of their trade.  

Now Kiger and Wolf have their own turning points worthy of floral arrangements: The younger is celebrating 30 years of marriage, and her mother is celebrating 60 years.  

Kiger hopes to explore a path she always wondered about — working with elementary age youth in local classrooms. 

For Wolf, at age 82, she envisions reading books, gardening and holidays without the tempestuous flower trade. 

“But I’ll be right next door, that’s where we live,” she said.

Such a tie to the community as a flower shop comes with great dedication. Wolf and Kiger recall decades of not only anniversaries and birthdays, but also bereavement and heavy personal situations. 

“We see all of it,” Kiger said. ”It's an honor to help people during the most exciting, heartfelt, grieving times of their lives.”

Wolf can remember countless events that strengthened her rapport with the Kalispell community. 

“The birth of a child, people who were sick and dying, funeral services. We've cried along with the families lots of times.”

Kiger has delivered graveside flowers for two generations of one family, realizing with surprise, “That’s 44 Memorial Days!”  

PEOPLE HAVE come to the shop since it was Salmon’s Greenhouses in 1908. Back then, a boiler system heated the greenhouses with steam, fired by wood, coal or sawdust. 

A flower shop was added in 1934 and it became Woodland Floral and Greenhouses. 

In 1941, the Hatchetts opened a flower shop just off Main Street where it stayed until about 1954, when they moved back to the shop’s current location. 

Fay Wolf and her husband Wes bought the current shop and a location in Gateway West Mall from the Hatchetts in 1979. The shop at that point had taken on more modern fixtures: polymer plastic over the glass windows, and a natural gas overhead heating system installed so the boiler could retire. 

Wolf recalled the neighborhood before they bought the shop, which was across the way from a hospital. 

“Just the perfect spot for a flower shop,” she said. 

Now that hospital, the East Brick Building, contains apartments and businesses. 

At one point the family had three stores in the city, opening the third with the arrival of Kalispell Center Mall in 1986. Wolf says the community among florists in Flathead Valley was strong in that time. 

“Back then you had to borrow roses amongst each other and help out that way,” Wolf said.

Both mall shops closed in the early 1990s, and Woodland Floral remained, with its craft arrangements and delivery services — first run by Kiger when she was a child, then by her daughter Taylor, then by Taylor’s son Noah — to keep it flourishing alongside department store premade bouquets to the present day. 

Though she knows it may surprise the community, Kiger says her children have other careers in mind and she is fine with adding a new name to the shop’s long and storied life.

Whoever comes next, Kiger says, she’s going to make sure her customers are well taken care of. “We absolutely love our customers. Selling has been hard, because it is very important to me that the new owner be a good fit for the community.”

“But we can’t wait,” according to Kiger. “Mom needs to retire.”

Reporter Carl Foster can be reached at 758-4407 or cfoster@dailyinterlake.com.