On nice days at a nursery in northern Overland Park, customers sip lattes among plants. Lots of plants, that is.
Caffeine and chlorophyll; that’s the idea behind Café Equinox, the coffee shop at the Family Tree Nursery’s two locations in Shawnee and Overland Park.
Café Equinox has been a permanent fixture for the nursery’s Shawnee location for a few years, but in Overland Park, it’s only been seasonal: a lone coffee cart outside the greenhouse. But that’s about to change.
This spring, Café Equinox will unveil a new permanent cafe inside the Overland Park’s Family Tree location at 8424 Farley St.; this one will be indoors and open all year.
If all goes according to plan, Nelson said, then the shop will open in mid-March, in time for the nursery’s spring open house event.
Café Equinox is at 8424 Farley St.
- The cafe will open in a new space currently being constructed inside the nursery’s indoor retail area.
- Family Tree Nursery operates just off 85th and Farley streets in northern Overland Park.
- Once the new cafe opens, its regular hours will be 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.
Café Equinox serves coffee in a “botanically-inspired” setting
The coffee shop’s menu features a variety of drinks, from classics like americanos and cortados to seasonal lattes (such as the “harvest moon” latte, with pumpkin, espresso and fall spices).
The new cafe in Overland Park will have both indoor and greenhouse seating, in contrast to the “temporary” cafe that currently just has seating in the greenhouse.
The coffee comes from Kansas City-based Thou Mayest Coffee Roasters. The cafe also serves pastries from Kansas City-based Heirloom Bakery & Hearth.
Café Equinox is a fraternal collaboration. Brothers Jonah and Jesse Nelson own Family Tree Nursery, while Thou Mayest is owned by their brother, Bo Nelson.
The fall and spring equinox are the two points in the year when the daytime and nighttime hours are of equal length — half dark, half light. That balance is where Jonah said the idea of mixing coffee and plants ultimately comes from.
“You’ve got this juxtaposition of these two things that are moving together to create energy,” he said. “The coffee, which is the dark, and then the chlorophyll, which is the light. (Coffee) gives people life and energy, and chlorophyll gives the plants life.”
Café Equinox has been in Johnson County since 2019
The Nelson family initially opened Café Equinox inside the Family Tree Nursery’s Shawnee location in 2019. But after the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic had passed, the cafe underwent a remodel and reopened in 2021.
Around the same time, the seasonal coffee cart began popping up inside the Overland Park nursery.
The new permanent fixture at the Overland Park location isn’t where growth will end for Café Equinox, either. The Nelson brothers have another nursery and botanically-inspired cafe in the works further south, just off U.S. Highway 69 and 167th Street (near the Bluhawk development).
Jonah Nelson said that project is still in the early design stages, and it won’t come to fruition for another few years. But the final result will still give people the same opportunity to enjoy a cup of coffee among lots of plants.
“I 100% believe, with everything in me, that we have an innate desire inside of us as humans to interact with plant material,” Jonah Nelson said. “As the cities develop more and more concrete, we all have a greater desire to be outside, because we need vitamin D, and we need that exposure to nature.”
Ultimately, growing is what Jonah Nelson said excites him most about all of this — both in terms of plants and people.
“What’s exciting to me is we’re offering to our community — the community of Kansas City — a place for people to grow,” he said. “We’re growing relationships, and we’re hopefully helping people grow relationships with plants.”
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