Following my phone’s navigation and driving to the cultivation facility of Flora & Flame in West Oakland, California, makes me feel like I typed in the wrong address. I park near an abandoned brown cushionless couch and walk towards two houses: a small sage green and white one with vertical striped green and white window awnings that look like they’ve been baking in the sun since the 1970s and a brown and cream Victorian. Both homes are from the 1880s, when West Oakland’s population expanded to house railroad workers after Oakland became the West Coast terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1863.
The houses are sandwiched between two industrial buildings, one of which is decidedly newer and turns out to be my destination. When I walk up, there’s Instead, I enter a bright white room lit by LEDs shining on stacked shelves of flowering cannabis plants growing in beds of soil. Castle calls this place a spaceship and it does feel like a grow room in another realm. It’s bright and clean and layered with two vertical stacks of fragrant cannabis buds. Flora & Flame is a living weed depository filled with shelves of growing cannabis plants.
