DENVER • In the yard of a house in the Uptown neighborhood sits a towering, inflatable mushroom — one with a red cap and white speckles.

Walk inside the house and you’ll find posters filled with different illustrations of plants and their properties. The smell of coffee blends with incense.

Welcome to Plant Magic Cafe. The cafe, which opened on last year’s winter solstice, serves up coffee and unique tinctures, including adaptogenic lattes.

In addition to regular espresso drinks, the cafe offers a range of “magic lattes” — drinks with adaptogens, which are plants used in herbal medicine. These include ingredients like lion’s mane, reishi, cacao, licorice root and maitake, to name a few.

Outside of beverages, the cafe sources their baked goods from local French bakery La Belle.

“We’re letting food be medicine,” said cafe owner Meaghan Richmond. “It can fuel you, it can heal you, it can give you energy, it can relax you — the nourishment behind what we put into us is important and it’s also nice to just sit down and enjoy a fresh French pastry.”

The most popular drink on the menu: the chagachino, made with cacao. Cacao, one of Richmond’s favorite ingredients, has been used by South American cultures for centuries as a “heart opener.” And science agrees, with recent studies showing the antioxidants in the bean helps lower blood pressure, improve blood flow to one’s brain and heart and helps prevent blood clots.

“It opens the heart, and it drops you and lands you into presence for the day,” Richmond said. “That particular plant medicine, it’s very soft and subtle. And, it does what chocolate does best and just brings you into a little bit of joy.”

The cafe also hosts events, including Celtic magic lessons and cacao ceremonies to teach people about the long history of rituals associated with the plant. Richmond describes the space as “Hogwarts meets Johns Hopkins.”

Many people wander into the cafe sparked by curiosity, seeing the giant mushrooms outside.

“They’re excited to explore. They feel like they walked into a different reality,” Richmond said. “A lot of those sorts of practices, especially in my Celtic traditions, are really based around the elements, the directions, and the flowers, and plants and trees.”

The cafe also brings people together. As Richmond says, it’s not just the plants that bring healing, it’s also the community.

“I think the mission is to really just create a container where people feel, is a place to be in community,” Richmond said. “We feel that community is medicine, that we are each other’s medicine. So of course, highlighting the plants, highlighting rituals, highlighting ceremonies, but it’s really us coming together. That’s the baseline of all of those things.”