John Bailey Owen

After a friend suggested that John Bailey Owen watch Adventure Time, he knew he wanted to write for animation. Mission accomplished. Most recently, he spent four years as a staff writer (as well as story editor and co-producer) on The Owl House. He’s also in the succulent business. But unlike those hobbyists jumping on the bandwagon of propagating plants from cuttings, he starts from seed. 

It’s a passion that dates back to high school when he attended the Philadelphia Flower Show. He thought he would see people battling it out over who had grown the craziest-looking flower. Instead, it was mostly themed displays. Still, he took a wander around, and that’s when he discovered “some succulents that looked like exposed brains. Lithops! That’s more what I was looking for,” he says. 

From then on, he started growing succulents, but it wasn’t until he moved to Los Angeles that he went “insane with them.” He says he grows succulents from seeds because “it gets you the most interesting plants. Someone sends you a tiny envelope, and soon you can have a specimen that grows on a single hill in Namibia. Nurseries can’t provide that kind of variety, and most of their specimens have been propagated by division, which is just pulling apart one plant to make it into multiple plants. So they all look the same. But every seed can grow into an individual with its own traits.”Owen loves watching his plants change from “teeny tiny babies to big weirdos,” but this means he ends up with more plants than even he wants. As a result, he started Good Pup Plants. All of the specimens he sells are grown from seed, have well-developed root systems, and are shipped bare-rooted with a side of special soil. 

Etsy.com/shop/GoodPupsPlants
Instagram.com/johnbaileyowen 
johnbaileyowen@gmail.com