Our Story: From Lemon Seeds to Swan & Thorn

I didn’t set out to start a business.

I planted a lemon seed.

It was 2020. I was working from home, bored out of my mind, and looking for something peaceful to do while the world felt anything but peaceful.

One seed became a few. A few became dozens. Before long, somewhere between 50 and 100 little lemon trees had taken over my windowsills.

In hindsight, this probably shouldn’t have surprised me.

Plants had been part of my life long before I thought of selling one.

As a child, I collected cacti. One of my favorite things to do was arrange little Kinder toys around a huge aloe on the windowsill, turning its pot into a tiny world of its own.

That aloe stayed in our family for years.

Much later, during the war in Ukraine, the house was bombed and badly damaged. The house was eventually restored. The aloe didn’t survive.

But one of its babies did.

That plant is still growing with me in the United States.

Maybe that’s why I’ve never been very good at thinking of plants as decoration. They grow with us. They divide, get passed along, outlive rooms and sometimes entire chapters of our lives.

So when I began planting obsessively during lockdown, it felt less like discovering a new hobby and more like finding my way back to something I already knew.

Eventually, I had far too many lemon trees to keep.

I listed a few on eBay for about five dollars each.

They sold quickly.

But the interesting part wasn’t the five dollars.

It was the people.

Collectors appeared. Growers appeared. Other sellers appeared. Suddenly I had found people who were perfectly happy to spend an unreasonable amount of time talking about roots, cuttings, soil and whatever strange plant had caught their attention that week.

One woman reached out after a divorce. She was raising a child and wanted to learn how to sell lemon seedlings herself to make some additional income.

So I told her what I knew.

Technically, I suppose I was helping a competitor.

I never really saw it that way.

There are enough windowsills in the world.

By then, my own collection was becoming considerably stranger.

Lemons led me back to cacti. Cacti led to bonsai, mature specimens, rare houseplants and succulents so bizarre they looked less like houseplants and more like evidence of life on another planet.

That eventually became my plant series, Grounded & Rare.

But the same instinct kept pulling me beyond plants.

I would find a handmade pot and notice the fingerprints and irregularities left behind by the person who made it. Then beadwork. Jewelry. Art. An old object. Something beautifully strange that I hadn’t been looking for until I saw it and suddenly needed to know its story.

That is how Swan & Thorn came to be.

Not because I sat down and decided the world needed another store.

I just kept finding things worth bringing home.

Some are grown.

Some are made.

Some are found.

They might be a plant that took ten years to become interesting, a ceramic piece shaped by hand, a strand of beadwork made one tiny piece at a time, or something I simply can’t stop looking at.

There isn’t a complicated philosophy behind it.

I like things that feel alive.

Things with evidence of a person, a place or a little time behind them.

Things you notice.

And things that, once they’re yours, make home feel a little more like home.

Swan & Thorn

Things of beauty, made & found.

Lena Lebid
Founder, Swan & Thorn