Connecting with Oliana Gardening was superbly serendipitous. As an interior designer and landlord, my gardens need to be both aesthetic and highly functional, and preferably mostly native. I needed a landscaping establishment that was reliable, trustworthy, knowledgeable about natives, the right price, able to do both maintenance and renovations, and, this was a biggie, artistically trained. Oliana Gardening is meeting all these needs beautifully.
Reliable and trustworthy means appointments are kept, communication is good, work gets finished, and my property gets cleaned and locked up as it should be. Being able to trust Oliana Gardening as I do makes my life so much easier.
Jumanji really knows her native plants, and helped me figured out a scheme for a sunny front garden that I was failing miserably with on my own. I'd spoken to other people about natives before, but they either couldn't imagine an entirely native garden, or were so natives-oriented they seemed to sniff at my aesthetic needs. Jumanji supports my dual and sometimes conflicting requirements. For example, while it's stressful on sword ferns to completely cut their old fronds, we're compromising with selective trimming.
The fact that Jumanji does both installations and maintenance is especially helpful because every act of maintenance from pruning to carefully placing excess leaves in the right spot all leads toward the overall garden vision. She's not going to damage anything from ignorance or mess up what is working well like my clean gravel drive by getting dirt all over it as one "gardener" did. More, Jumanji keeps teaching me new things about gardening, which makes the process fun.
To me, Jumanji's greatest asset, is that is also an artist. Many companies have great plant knowledge or construction abilities, but their gardens often lack unity or artistry. I absolutely love collaborating with Oliana Gardening as one creative with another. Jumanji understands the creative process, creative angst, and "can we move it again?" Jumanji also has other equally talented colleagues, so when I wanted a border between my plants and gravel, she brought in an artist friend who can weld. Together they created a beautiful steel border and craftily installed it among carefully placed rocks to make everything look level and balanced.
Last, Oliana Gardening understands my garden ambitions aren't backed by a big budget so existing plants, rocks, leaves etc. have been used to their utmost. To offset costs, we'll figure out things I can do myself, we'll work together for a bit (such as when she wrapped one of my trees with holiday lights and installed some new large rocks), or spread work out over several months. My garden has really come together since working with Oliana Gardening, and I look forward to working with the company long into the future. read more
