I have been working for a small landscaping company that “focuses on natural plant communities and ecological practices” for the past 3 years and wanted to share my experience.
Run away. Start your own business. If you need to hire, do your diligence, have a plan, and show them exactly how you want things done, down to each specific plant.
Every new job site, me and a coworker will assess a site, soil conditions, invasive pressure, what is existing and native, etc. my boss takes this information to build a plan with plants that will work with the soil and homeowners aesthetics.
Except, every property, we clear cut and start over, removing all plant matter, invasive or not.
Think cutting down a regenerating forest of oak and maple, to be replaced by panicle hydrangeas, inkberry holly, Japanese spirea, and if you’re lucky, fragrant sumac, the cultivar one.
Then, we remove the upper 6” of soil because “this soil is crap”. You know, the same, sandy acidic New England soil that our native plants are adapted to.
New topsoil, then we plant the perennials “native to this area or ones that are beneficial to pollinators”
Echinacea, aromatic aster, nepeta, Shasta daisies, anise hyssop, all cultivars.
None of those plants are native to New England, and half aren’t even native to North America. By amending the soil (with 50% compost!!), the perennials in these beds grow too fall, and flop under their own weight because the soil is too rich now. Add in drip irrigation and everything smells like the muck you’d find at the bottom of a pond.
The tree company came to a house last week, they cut down 5 perfectly healthy white pine trees so we could come in and plant a kousa dogwood. My boss was all for it, referring to pine trees as “nothing good except for losing lower limbs and falling on people’s homes”.
My boss talked another homeowner into removing all her pine trees, on her wooded lot, and now the town is going after her for removing too many trees at once per town ordinance.
I have cut down, pulled, and sprayed more native species than I have removed invasive species. Or replanted with natives. Every week, my car comes home filled with native tree and shrub saplings, and perennials that are viewed as “thugs” by my boss. I do volunteer land trust work and I plant everything I save down there, if it doesn’t go in my own yard.
Like this patch of goldenrod, jewelweed, mountain mint, swamp aster, and swamp milkweed that was subsequently weedwhacked. My boss didn’t want these seeds spreading, but she had us leave all the invasive thistle and orchard grass instead.
I told her the importance of leaving seeds over the winter for foraging birds like dark eyed juncos but she said it doesn’t matter because the birds will spread them and the birds can use the bird feeder anyways.
I forgot to mention that every house we work on still has mosquito and tick service come, as well as pesticide treatment for lawns.
Nothing like clear cutting a regenerating environment, changing the soil, adding plants not native to the area, only for those few bumble bees that find nectar to be subsequently sprayed by mosquito Joe, and calling yourself a “natural landscaping” service.
by Platinum_wolf_420
8 Comments
I had a very similar humbling work experience. I think what it comes down to is the type of people that can afford gardeners are also the type of people who afford not to care. I love the actual work but everything else is completely soul sucking.
This is really disheartening. The places around me talk a good game, at least. Is your employer just really good at B-S’ing with the clients? Aren’t any of them upset they wound up with the same thing they’re seeing from other, probably cheaper, landscaping companies?
This is so disturbing! It’s 2025, why can’t people do some research and stop being so horrible?! I hope you can write to the township or maybe join forces with a local nursery/actually interested native plant group and use these real life cases to educate further. Your real life experience is so important – sounds like homeowners are putting too much trust in the company and the company is not being responsible (or, if it’s the other way, just going after the $ and not standing up and educating homeowners with better solutions).
I am chipping away at my own lawn, don’t spray anything, and put signs out to educate my neighbors. Second year mountain mint from plugs is attracting so many pollinators, was really fun to watch in action today. Thank you for caring and salvaging you can from work sites 🙁
https://preview.redd.it/j6j5gxm0thbf1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8a35e6ee69144d3fd7c36e1caa06742fbf75e523
That’s such a shame. I’ve recently stumbled into this same problem with seed mixes who brand themselves as native like “northeast mix”, and then a ton aren’t even native to North America. Crazy!
Part of me is hopeful the tide can change, but there’s a shocking lack of broader appreciation for how problematic invasive species are.
> By amending the soil (with 50% compost!!),
This is a very novice question, I know next to nothing about soil: what’s bad about 50% compost? Is that a New England specific issue or all of North America?
> the perennials in these beds grow too fall, and flop under their own weight because the soil is too rich now.
Oh is this the reason? So basically the native soil isn’t super rich, but that causes them to grow the proper height?
> so we could come in and plant a kousa dogwood.
These are all over my neighborhood it drives me nuts
It sounds like you have a business opportunity.
I also started a native gardening/landscaping business after working for another! Had us doing Spring clean-ups in FEBRUARY when it should wait until after mother’s day in our region. And it was always an intense cleaning, completely breaking the lifecycles of all the insects and birds we were advertising to protect.
One weekend was spent throwing up out both ends after boss had me digging hundreds of holes for new plantings… beneath an oak… Hacking away at roots in mid-July. Never been so sick. The things she had us do made zero sense logistically or ecologically.
The pay also sucked! Didn’t even cover health insurance for my back after busting it for her.
Is your boss an incredibly racist older woman? I also worked in a MA native landscaping company lol, it was a nightmare. HMU when you start your own business!
This is so unethical and disheartening. Native plant gardens are for delawning, not clear cutting and setting everyone backwards for CO2 emissions releasing whole stands of established, primary, or secondary succession forest and especially intact stands of trees not yet fragmented if land is partially developed. Where is the site assessment or permits for clear cutting or pesticide application for that matter? No reading of the landscape is so ignorant for New England land history. This sounds like a historical case of land value waiting to happen.
The reputable native plant landscaping businesses I know in New England would never do this! They are against pesticides and clear cutting and even against intensive practices because they work so the nature not against it and that is good business.