Seeing green: He took a 22-foot bus to the Southwest, filled it with plants, and his business blew up

Something happened to Joshua Cooper in the past few weeks.

The 35-year-old plant enthusiast doesn’t really know how else to describe it.

He started his business, The Deku Tree, just over a year ago in the garage of a foreclosed house he bought in Humboldt.

Business was good, no question. Cooper recognizes the dumb luck that his nursery was one of the few retailers the pandemic impacted for the better as people spent more time at home looking for new hobbies, and many of them turned to testing out their green thumbs.

But in the past month, it has been more than good.

It has been insane.

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked as hard as I’ve worked these past few weeks,” Cooper said.

Last year, he started his business after a trip to the southwest part of the country to collect rare plants, primarily succulents and cacti. It’s a trip he made entirely in his blue and white, 22-foot-long E450 Ford bus, which caused a more than two-week delay in the trip when it broke down in Arizona.

This year, he fixed up the bus — which he has since named Mongo Bongo — and made the trip again. Only this time, he catalogued the 10-day journey on social media.

People took notice.

“Something happened where a whole bunch more people started following the page,” Cooper said. “I didn’t even understand the amount of interest there until I got back. All these people were just really excited about these plants.”

By the end of the trip, he had a space only about 5 1/2 feet long and 14 inches wide in which to sleep — a tight squeeze for someone who’s just over 6 feet tall.

“The whole bus was just covered in cactus spines and succulent leaves,” he said. “I think I was covered head to toe — still happy though.”

Cooper came back wwith 833 plants and just shy of 5,000 Facebook followers.

After bus trouble soured his plans for a plant-selling event, Cooper started listing the plants for sale online via Facebook. The response was immediate.

As soon as he was posting pictures of the plants, people were commenting their interest in buying.

The setup was simple. Comment “sold” first, and the plant was yours. If there were multiple plants available, they’d go in the order comments were received.

“Some plants, there were only two available, and there would be seven or eight comments ‘sold,’ ” Cooper said. “It was a dream.”

The Deku Tree’s Facebook page also has become a sort of community for plant lovers. Scroll through the comments, and you’ll find dozens of people sharing pictures of their plant “babies” from Cooper in their new homes or asking for care advice.

Others are wishing Cooper a good morning, good night or thanking him for the work he does.

“The sky is the limit for you,” one person writes.

“I’ve never refreshed a page as many times as I did yesterday,” another added in the height of the online sales.

It hasn’t been even a month since he returned, and Cooper has sold about 500 of the plants he got on the trip.

“I didn’t expect to go through it that quickly,” he said, adding that he has another trip planned for summer.

He just has to fix the bus, again, first.