About beautiful, functional, kind to the Earth landscapes, using native plants
Let us help you:
- Realize your landscape vision
- Provide food, shelter, nesting areas, clean water and rest stops for wildlife, including pollinators, birds, and butterflies.
- Redirect storm water run-off into a rain garden, rain barrel or a planted area to clean waterways, replenish aquifers, reduce flooding, move water away from house.
- Eliminate landscape pollution: air/emissions, light, pesticides, noise, invasive plants.
- Improve soils to sequester more carbon, improve storm water infiltration and support underground ecosystems.
- Use locally available, recycled and/or renewable resources.
- Integrate your existing plants if they are healthy, not invasive and meet design goals.
- Reconnect with nature, which often escapes us during our busy, technology driven lives. Become a caretaker of your own little nature preserve outside your door!
- Save money! Reduce the costs of mistakes made when you don’t have a professional design plan. A sustainable landscape will also reduce energy and other costs.
- This type of landscape is more important than ever to protect the plants and wildlife that were once abundant and are impacted by invasive species, pesticides, climate change, development, etc.
About Denise Sandoval, landscape designer and owner
I first discovered the beauty and benefits of native plants while volunteering at a local prairie. After completing my horticulture design degree in 2003 and making a career leap from engineering after 15 years, I created this business in 2005 to specifically design native plant landscapes that included but also went beyond visual appeal and human function. My expertise is blending great landscape design with local ecology and sustainable solutions. The natural world is my greatest inspiration and teacher! I’m still learning, curious and awestruck by nature everyday.
I’ve been a student of both local ecology and design for over 20 years. I garden with native plants in my own yard, perform prescribed burns, installed the first of many rain gardens in 2004, and collect many native plant seeds. I worked retail at The original Natural Garden* native plant nursery (2003-05) prior to starting my business, and as a Conservation@ Home assistant for The Conservation Foundation. I served on the boards of Wild Ones Greater DuPage chapter for 15 years, including President, and DuPage Monarch Project. In 2014, one of the projects I designed won a Chicago Wilderness Conservation award.
I’m a longtime member of the Illinois Native Plant Society Northeast chapter, Wild Ones Greater DuPage chapter, The Xerces Society, The Conservation Foundation, and other conservation groups.
I understand I live, play and work on the sacred but stolen homelands of the Council of Three Fires (Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi) and other tribes. They were the original stewards of this land, and still have a relationship I will honor and learn from
*The original Natural Garden grew close to 300 local ecotype native plants, starting in the 1980s, but sadly closed in 2008, and was later acquired by Midwest Groundcovers in 2011.