We’ve told you in our “Blog Inspiration” section what the purpose of this site is, but thought it might be nice to share a little about ourselves and how we came to start our business.
Here goes…
We started our family landscaping business over 20 years ago because we both share a love for nature. While we both were raised in the Milwaukee area, our interest in landscaping came from different childhood experiences.
John’s family built a home in New Berlin back in the 1970’s on a three acre lot. Back then, much of New Berlin was rural and so there was a lot of work to be done on the lot planting trees, moving soil, and establishing a yard.
John spent a lot of time with his father doing just that. His memories include helping his father dig the “Nile” as they called it. It was basically a drainage swale that ran the length of his front yard that collected and moved water during a rainstorm. Together, he and his dad spent many a weekend digging this impressive swale with only two hand shovels. The dirt they excavated was piled into a small trailer that his dad’s Simplicity tractor pulled, and then drove to another part of the yard to be shoveled back out again. While the physical work was hard, that experience of working with the land creating other things like a fieldstone wall and digging saplings out of a tree line to plant on the property, really stuck with John.
Christine’s introduction to nature was different in that she grew up in a city setting. Her parents liked to take the family to Whitnall Park every weekend to walk the trails and look at the beautiful gardens.
Christine remembers how her mother would stop along a walk and point out to her and her sisters, things like the way leaves had different vein structures or how plants dropped their seeds. It was Christine’s mom that always said “look”, “smell”, “touch”, “listen”, that cultivated this curiosity about nature, pause for observation, and focus on detail – which to this day, is still a motivating connection Christine makes with landscaping.
Since those childhood days, we both took a more serious approach to starting a business. We each pursued a business degree and we both expanded our horticultural knowledge and skill set through formal classes, industry experience and a lot of learning as we go which was the most fun!
Our entrepreneurial spirit, combined with the excitement of growing something of value, has motivated us these past two decades to take joy and pride in what we do.
“Beauty by Nature…Function by Design” is our slogan and it really does describe what we’re all about. We recognize that our outside world is gifted to us and we are given the opportunity to responsibly shape it into what we deem as most important to us.
With that … we close. Thank you for getting to know us a little better!
John & Christine Wollenziehn
Owners of Spring Gardens Landscaping & Horticultural Services, Inc
