When Kathy Kepler was offered a job forty years ago to help sell sweet corn from a roadside farmstand, she took the job because she thought the guy managing it, Steve, was cute. She has good instincts: She’s now been both his business partner and his wife for decades.
Steve had long been helping his older brother, Frank, with his homegrown produce, which they began selling in 1977 all around Rochester from those roadside stands. They named the produce business Sara’s, after Frank’s daughter, born that same year. With time and demand, the business evolved from those humble beginnings to a sprawling, multifaceted store, Sara’s Garden Center, located at 389 East Avenue in Brockport. It now sells hundreds of varieties of indoor and outdoor plants, seeds, gardening tools, décor, and more.
As Sara’s approaches its fiftieth anniversary, Kepler reflects on the journey that brought them here. She and Steve took over the business in 2001, during a period marked by personal losses and professional change—just as Frank and his wife were ready to hand over the reins. After so much uncertainty, the moment suddenly felt right.
“We landed in a good spot,” says Kepler. “And we were ready to take Sara’s to another level.”
They expanded on what was already being done, building nearly 20,000 square feet of greenhouses and furthering the venture into water gardens, including continued care for the now thirty-five-year-old lotus in one of the display ponds.
Amidst all that evolution, Frank never left. He still serves as the nursery’s primary greenhouse grower. “He so loves growing things,” Kepler says. “He couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”
The grounds behind the store, with paths winding through elaborate display gardens and stone walls, invite customers to explore, conjuring an aura of mystery and endless possibilities. “That’s the goal,” she says. “You never know what you’re going to find. I almost want you to get lost out there.”
The stone walls are truly unique to Sara’s. Scott George, a Brockport resident and fellow plant lover who had long shopped at the garden center, builds stone walls professionally. Every fall for about fifteen years, he and several other world-renowned stonemasons—John Shaw-Rimmington from Canada, Patrick McAfee from Ireland, and Scottish master craftsman Norman Haddow, who worked on structures as famous as Scotland’s Balmoral Castle—came to Sara’s to teach classes and add elaborate, one-of-a-kind walls to the grounds with help from the students.
Kepler emphasizes that stones of these types are not something simply bought by the pallet at a hardware store. “You work with what you have,” she says, just as traditionally would have been done with stone buildings. For these classes and their resulting walls, George gathered many tons of stone from local hedgerows.
Those workshops ended with the COVID-19 pandemic, but the walls they built still stand strong—and are a popular draw for customers. Among the many photogenic sites on the property, the arched stone moon gate is perhaps the most popular stop. It was built in a single weekend by those craftsmen along with ten students.
For decades, local high school students have gathered at the garden center in their best finery for prom photos at the moon gate. Kathy estimates that about 300 students came last spring. She gets teary-eyed about how touched she is that Sara’s is where they’d want to go. “It makes me think, ‘Look how much our community loves us.’ We’re so lucky.”
Sara’s is engrained in the community, proud to be both a Town of Clarkson business and the gardener for the Village of Brockport, managing the hanging baskets and garden beds along Main Street and helping to develop gardens that attract pollinators. “We love doing it. We love that they asked us,” Kathy says. “It has served us so well to be here.”
In November and December, the store transforms into a wonderland of Christmas décor, a destination built into many families’ traditions. “We get our tree there every Christmas,” says Anne Panning, a Brockport resident and English professor at SUNY Brockport. “Each tree has a name tag on it, which I’ve saved year after year—Abominable Snowman, Peppermint Patty. It’s so lovely.”
Once the holiday rush passes and the long, gray days of winter drag on, locals know to watch for the countdown of days until spring on Sara’s front sign, reassuring passersby that brighter days are coming.
Sara’s welcomes gardeners of every level, whether experts, hobbyists, or first-timers. Bring your visions and your questions, and the staff will help you find the plants, supplies, answers, and inspiration you need.
They keep up on trends like the Pantone color of the year (for 2026, it’s “cloud dancer” white) and the various plants of the year named by organizations like All-America Selections (Claire Orange rudbeckia, sedum spectacular, and others) and the Perennial Plant Association (Andropogon gerardii “Blackhawks”), to help inform displays and meet demand. During the pandemic, houseplants made a big comeback. “You couldn’t keep enough houseplants!” says Kathy. “And it’s still huge, which is great.”
If you’re not sure what you want—or even where to begin—just ask. “You’ll get more access to what’s out there for you, instead of limiting your choices,” Kathy says. “Bring me your measurements, your photos, and we can go through them and design something for you right here.” Rather than looking at a list of Latin plant names that might not mean anything to the customer, she can lay out a plan with them there on the shop floor. “I think that’s the best way to design,” she says. “You can see how textures complement each other. You can explain the process and give them the tools, the information, they can use.”
Kathy is happy to invest this time and use her love of plants to guide others. “My brain was built for this kind of work,” she says with a smile. “It’s immediately satisfying. And intensely rewarding.”
It’s no small commitment: seven days a week of physically demanding work, ten months of the year. Weekends are hectic. Summers come and go without vacations.
“But I can’t imagine not doing this,” Kathy says. “I’ve gotta be with my plants.” sarasgardencenter.com
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2026 issue of (585).
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